CHAPTER IX

CONCLUSION

Not only to the myth-theory but to every attempt at ejecting historical falsity from religion there has been offered the objection that religion "does good"; that mankind needs "some religion or other"; and that to "undermine faith" does social harm, even if it be by way of driving out delusion. This position is not at all special to orthodoxy. It was taken up by Middleton; by Kant, when he shaped a "practical" basis for theistic belief after eliminating the theoretic, and counselled unbelieving clergymen to use the Bible for purposes of popular moral education; by Voltaire when he combated atheism after bombarding Christianity; and by Paine when he wrote his Age of Reason to save the belief in God.

Insofar as the general plea merely amounts to saying that mankind cannot conceivably give up its traditional religion at a stroke; that liberal-minded priests are better than illiberal, for all purposes; and that in a world dominated by economic need it is impossible for many enlightened clergymen to secure a living save in the profession for which they were trained, I am not at all concerned to combat it. For the liberal priest, enlightened too late to reshape his economic career, I have nothing but sympathy, provided that he in no way hampers the intellectual progress of others. Insofar, again, as the plea for "religion" is merely a plea for a word, or a thesis that all earnest conviction about life is religion, it is quite irrelevant to the present discussion. The rationalists who feel they cannot face the world without the label of "religion" for their theory of the cosmos and of conduct will be in the same position whether they believe in a "historical Jesus" or not; and those who must have a humanist "liturgy" of some sort in place of the ecclesiastical are apparently not troubled by problems of historicity. What we are concerned with is the notion that to deny the historicity of Jesus is somehow to imperil not only ethics but historical science.

M. Loisy puts the last point in his suggestion, in criticism of Drews, that he who thinks to break down either all the traditional or the "liberal" orthodoxies by denying the historic actuality of Jesus will find he has "only furnished to their defenders the occasion to persuade a certain not uncultivated public that the divinity of Christ, or at least the unique character of his personality, is as well guaranteed as the reality of his life and his death." [445] Had M. Loisy then forgotten that his own attempts to elide from the documents a number of details which he saw to be mythical have given occasion to the defenders of the faith to assure a not uncultivated public that the disintegration of the gospels destroyed all ground for belief in any part of them? [446]

We on this side of the Channel might meet such challenges, grounded on the susceptibilities of the "public," with the demand of our great humorist, Mr. Birrell: "What, in the name of the Bodleian, has the general public got to do with literature? The general public ... has its intellectual, like its lacteal sustenance, sent round to it in carts." [447]

But we must not turn the jest to earnest. There are plenty of honest laymen to play the jury; and to them let it be put. The issue between us and M. Loisy, as he virtually admits, must be fought out by argument. It is perfectly true, as he says, that "in principle, nothing is more legitimate, more necessary, than the comparative method; but nothing is more delicate to handle." [448] Every issue, then, must be vigilantly debated. But the obligation is reciprocal. In these inquiries we have found M. Loisy many times in untenable positions, and resorting to inconsistent arguments. The tests which he applies to a mass of tradition are equally destructive to most of what he retains.

Let illicit employments of the comparative method be discredited by all means; but let us also have done with a criticism which on one leaf claims that Jesus gave a "homogeneous" teaching which his disciples could not have "combined," and on the next avows that "the gospel ethic is no more consistent than the hope of the kingdom." [449] And when the myth-theorists are called upon to make no unwarranted assumptions, let us also have an end of such assertions as that "twenty-five or thirty years after the death of Jesus the principal sentences and parables of which the apostolic generation had kept memory were put in writing." [450] This is pure hypothesis, unsupported by evidence.

The issue between us and M. Loisy, once more, is not one in which merely he assails the myth-theory as outgoing its proofs: it is one in which his positions are at the same time assailed all along the line, and particularly at its centre, as incapable of resisting critical pressure. By all means let us seek that "the science of religion should be applied without preoccupations of contemporary propaganda or polemic." The present writer reached the myth-theory not by way of propaganda but as a result of sheer protracted failure to establish a presupposed historical foundation. Professor Smith disclaims all criticism of "Christianity." And if Professor Drews be blamed for avowing a religious aim, the answer is that he would otherwise be assailed as "irreligious," alike in his own country and elsewhere. The myth-theory has to meet other foes than M. Loisy.

It is remarkable that Professor Schmiedel, who has gone nearly as far as M. Loisy in recognizing in detail the force of the pressures on the historical position, makes the avowal: "My inmost religious convictions would suffer no harm, even if I now felt obliged to conclude that Jesus never lived," [451] though as a critical historian he "sees no prospect of this." He further avows that his religion does not require him "to find in Jesus an absolutely perfect model," and that in effect he does not find him so. [452] And he wrote in 1906 that "for about six years the view that Jesus never really lived has gained an ever-growing number of supporters," [453] adding that "it is no use to ignore it, or to frame resolutions against it." It is accordingly with no kind of polemic motive as against so entirely candid a writer that I suggest certain criticisms of his emotional positions as tending unconsciously to affect his judgment of the critical problem.

It is after the avowals above cited that he writes:-- [454]

Nor do I ask whether in Jesus' faith and ethical system what he had to offer was new. Was it able to give me something that would warm my heart and strengthen my life?--that is all I ask. What does it matter if one of the ideas of Jesus had been expressed once already in India, another once already in Greece, a third once already, or many times, by the Old Testament prophets, or by the much-praised Jewish Rabbis shortly before the time of Jesus? Such ideas may be found in books: that is all. What we ought to feel grateful to Jesus for, is that he was destined for the first time to make the ideas take effect and influence the lives of mankind in general.

It would, I think, be difficult to over-estimate the amount of psychic bias involved in that pronouncement, which contains a theorem no more fitly to be taken for granted than any concrete historic proposition. The Professor, it will be observed, does not specify a single teaching of Jesus as new, while admitting that some were not. What he says is, in effect, that other utterances of Jesuine doctrines do not "warm the heart"; that those of Jesus do; and that they "for the first time" caused certain doctrines to "take effect and influence the lives of mankind in general." What doctrines then are meant, and what effects are posited? And why do other utterances of the doctrines not "warm the heart"?

Presumably the doctrines in question are those of mutual love, of forgiveness of enemies, of doing as we would be done by. Concerning the gospel doctrine of reward the Professor makes a disclaimer; and concerning the doctrine that God cares for men as for the lilies and the birds he pronounces that it is "to-day not merely untrue: it is not even religious in the deepest sense of the term." [455] It is not then clear that he would acclaim the doctrine that to help the distressed is to succour the Lord. In any case, the detailed religious prescription of beneficence was not merely a Jewish maxim: it was an article of Egyptian religion; [456] and it can hardly be in respect of such teaching that the Professor affirms a new "influence on the lives of mankind in general."

Is it then in respect of mutual love and the forgiveness of enemies? If so, when did the change begin? Among the apostles? Among the Fathers? Among the bishops? Among the Popes? To put the issue broadly, was there more of good human life in Byzantium than in pagan Greece; or even in the Rome of the Decadence and the Dark and Middle Ages than in the Rome of the Republic? Was it because of Christian goodness that the decline of Rome was accelerated instead of being checked? And, to come to our own day, is the World War an evidence for an ethical change wrought by the teaching of Jesus--a war forced on the world by a Germany where there are more systematic students of the gospels than in all the rest of Europe? I leave it to Professor Schmiedel and Professor Drews to settle the point between them. They would perhaps agree--though as to this I am uncertain--on the Jesuine doctrine that morality is "nothing more than obedience to the will of God"; and that "every deed is to be judged by the standard, Will it bear the gaze of God?" [457] In any case I will affirm, for the consideration of those who on any such ground cling to the notion of something unique in the teaching of Jesus, that humanity is likely to make a much better world when it substitutes for such a moral standard, which is but a self-deluding substitution of God for the conscience that delimits God, the principle of goodwill towards men, and the law of reciprocity, articulately known to the mass of mankind millenniums before the Christian era, and all along disobeyed, then as now, partly because religious codes intervene between it and life. [458]

If it be admitted--and who will considerately deny it?--that the moral progress of mankind is made in virtue of recognition of the law of reciprocity, the case for the general moral influence of Christianity is disposed of, once for all. If the affirmation be still made, let it confront the challenge of rational sociology, [459] founded on the survey of all history--and the World War. Professor Schmiedel's large affirmation is vain in the face of all that. His real psychic basis, which in my judgment determines his critical presuppositions, lies in the phrase: "warms my heart." And that phrase is a tacit confession of religious partisanship, the result of his Christian training. [460]

The more the moral teaching of the gospels is comparatively studied, as apart from their myths of action and dogma, the more clear becomes its entire dependence on previous lore, [461] and its failure even to maintain the level of the best of that. The Sermon on the Mount is wholly pre-Christian. [462] It is a Christian scholar who points out that the Christian doctrine of forgiveness is fully set forth in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a century before the Christian era. In his view, those verses [463] "contain the most remarkable statement on the subject of forgiveness in all ancient literature." [464] Why then does it not warm the heart of Professor Schmiedel equally with the doctrine of the gospels? Simply because he was brought up to assign pre-eminence to the teaching of Jesus--God or Man. And here we have, in its fundamental form, that unchecked assumption of "uniqueness" which secretly dictates the bulk of the denials of the myth-theory. Canon Charles explicitly traces the Jesuine teaching to the verses in question:

That our Lord was acquainted with them, and that His teaching presupposes them, we must infer from the fact that the parallel is so perfect in thought and so close in diction between them and Luke xvii, 3; Matt. xvii, 15. [465] The meaning of forgiveness in both cases is the highest and noblest known to us....

One puts with diffidence the challenge, Was it then high and noble for the Teacher to give out as his own the teaching of another, instead of acknowledging it? Is it not incomparably more likely, on every aspect of the case, that the older teaching was thus appropriated by gospel-makers bent at once on giving the Divine One a high message and on securing acceptance for it by putting it in his mouth? Is not this the strict critical verdict, apart from any other issue?

The bias which balks at such a decision is the sign of the harm done to intellectual ethic by the inculcated presupposition. It ought to "warm the heart" of a good man to realize that the ideas which he has been taught to think the noblest were not the "unique" production of a Superman, but could be and were reached by Jews and Gentiles--for they are Gentile also--whose very names are unknown to us. A doctrine of forgiveness arose in prostrate Jewry precisely because rancour had there reached its maximum. As a doctrine of asceticism rises in a society where license has been at the extreme, so the phenomena of hate breed a recoil from that. The doctrine of non-resistance was current among the Pharisees of the period of the Maccabean revolt; and the Testaments of the Patriarchs is the work of a Pharisee. And the gospels have nevertheless taught all Christians to regard the Pharisees collectively, with the Scribes, as a body devoid of all goodness. There is, be it said--not for the first time--a pessimism in the Christian conception of things; a pessimism which denies the element of goodness in man in the very act of ascribing it as a specialty to One, and relying on his "influence" to spread it among men incapable of rising to it for themselves. The story of Lycurgus and Alcander is the best ancient example to the precept, quite transcending that of the good Samaritan, [466] and it is one of the antidotes to the Christian pessimism which stultifies its own parable by denying in effect that The Samaritan could think as ethically as The Jew.

It is pessimism, yet again, that accepts the verdict: "Christianity is the truth of humanity." [467] Were it not that Dr. Schmiedel endorses it, I should have been inclined to use a stronger term. This too is myth-making. It would be strange indeed if any depth of truth were sounded by men who had not the first elements of a conscience for truth of statement, truth of history: whose very notion of truth was a production of fiction. The "truth of humanity" is something infinitely wider than the structure raised by the "prophets" and "apostles" of the Jesus-cult, out of pre-existing materials, some two thousand years ago; and humanity will outlive that presentment of its cosmos and its destinies as it has outlived others. If it should carry something of the one with it, so does it from the others--even as the one drew from its predecessors; and it will certainly jettison more than it will keep. I have not noted in the Testaments of the Patriarchs any such nullification of its doctrine of forgiveness as is embodied in the promise of future perdition for Chorazin and Bethsaida, or in the story of Ananias and Sapphira, to say nothing of the Jesuine doctrine of future torment. The hate that breathes in "Ye brood of vipers"; in the continual malediction against Scribes and Pharisees as universally hypocrites, "sons of Gehenna," making their proselytes twice as bad as themselves; and in the Johannine "your father the devil"--all these are "Christian" specialties, turning to naught the Jewish precept of forgiveness.

And I can "see no prospect" of a long currency for Professor Schmiedel's panegyric of fictitious sayings in Acts [468] as "of the deepest that can be said about the inner Christian life." If that be so, what amount of profundity goes to the whole construction of the faith? How long is it to be maintained that the secret or inspiration of good life lies in the ideas of men for whom the framing of false history was a pious occupation? The main ethical content of the Christian system, the moral doctrine by which the Church has lived down till the other day, is the ethic-defying doctrine of the redemption of mankind by a blood sacrifice--a survival of immemorial savagery. That is still the specifically "evangelical" view of Christianity. After living by the doctrine through two eras, the slowly civilizing conscience of the Church has itself begun to repudiate it; and we have the characteristic spectacle of its defenders declaring that the very terms of the historic creed form a libel framed by its enemies. Taught at last by human reason that the doctrine of sacrifice is the negation of morality, they pretend that that doctrine is not Christian. Without it, their Church would never have taken its historic form. To eliminate it, they have to suppress half their literature, prose and verse. The accommodations by which the fundamental immorality has been modified in the interests of saner morality are but the dictates of human experience; and these dictates are in turn pretended to be the revelation of the faith that flouted them.

Unless the world is again to retrogress collectively in its civilization, this polemic will not long avail to obscure historic issues. It is not merely the "religion" of Professor Drews, it is the emancipated human reason, that denies the mortmain of ancient Syria over the field of ethical thought, and claims the birthright of modern man in his own moral law. Not one day has passed since the penning of the Apocalypse without men's hating each other in the name of Jesus. Wars generations long have been waged for interpretations of the lore. Hatred and malice and all uncharitableness stamp all the Sacred Books; and the literature of the Fathers imports into the dwindling intellectual life of the West all the rancour of battling Judaism. In our own day, Professor Schmiedel is malignantly assailed in the name of the divinity of the figure of which he claims to prove the exemplary humanity, his reasoned argument winning him no goodwill from the supernaturalists. And around him there figure virulent partisans, incapable of his candour, so little capable of love for enemies that they cannot conduct a debate without passion, perversion and insolence. A multitude of those who acclaim the gospel Jesus as the supreme Teacher reveal themselves as below the standards of normal candour.

From such pretenders to moral authority, the seeker for truth turns to the layman similarly concerned, and to those professional scholars who are capable of debating without passion, and in good faith. Professor Schmiedel and M. Loisy are still, it is to be hoped, types of many. The problem is in the end, unalterably, one of historical science; and only by the use of all the methods of sound historical science will it ever be solved.

It is not merely in regard to the study of Christian origins that sociological problems are vitiated by the habitual passing of à priori judgments on issues never critically considered. When an expert hierologist like Dr. Budge tells us repeatedly that in ancient Egypt a "highly spiritual," "lofty spiritual" and "elevated" religion went hand in hand with a system of sorcery of "degrading" savagery, [469] we are led to inquire how the estimates of altitude are reached or justified. There appears to be no answer save that Dr. Budge holds certain theories about the universe, and, finding these more or less akin to the esoteric theology of Egypt, laurels his own opinions in this fashion. But Dr. Budge is no more entitled than any one else to settle such questions without rational discussion, and the reason of some of us revolts at the concept of a conjoined sublimity and imbecility as a spurious paradox. It is but a convention of supernaturalist apriorism, figuring where it has no right of entry. In precisely the same fashion, Dr. Estlin Carpenter credits to the Aztecs a "lofty religious sentiment," avowed to be "strangely blended with a hideous and sanguinary ritual." [470] The "lofty" is again a wreath for the writer's own philosophy of religion, in terms of which the act of the "good Samaritan," performed a million times by unpretending human beings, was imaginable only by a supernormal Jew, and unmatchable in pagan thought.

In a word, these moral pretensions had better be withdrawn from the area of historical discussion proper. Involving as they do the inference that "lofty" religious conceptions are not merely of no moral value but potent sanctions for all manner of evil, they very effectually stultify themselves. But rationalism needs not, and should not seek, to turn such blunders to its account. As M. Loisy claims, the ground of historic criticism is not the place for such polemic, which tends only to confuse the scientific issue. That is hard enough to solve, with the best will and the best methods.

APPENDIX A

THE "TEACHING OF THE TWELVE APOSTLES"

(Nov. 1 and 8, 1891.)

[The following is a revised translation of the Didachê tôn dôdeka apostolôn, discovered by Philotheos Bryennios, Metropolitan of Nicomedia (then of Serres), in 1873, in the library attached to the Monastery of the Most Holy Sepulchre, in the Phanar, or Greek quarter, of Constantinople. It was part of a manuscript containing several ancient documents, including two Epistles of Clement of Rome, which Bryennios published in 1875. Not till 1883 did he publish the Didachê.

Of the genuineness of the MS. there can be no reasonable doubt. That there was current in the early Church a "Teaching of the Twelve Apostles" appears from Eusebius (H. E. iii, 25) and Athanasius (Festal Epistle 39, C.E. 367). There were very good reasons why the Church, as time went on, should desire to drop the Teaching from her current literature. It is obviously in origin a purely Jewish document, and the first six chapters show no trace of Jesuism. We have already stated the reasons for concluding that the primary "Teaching" was the official doctrine of the twelve Jewish apostles of the High Priest to the Jews dispersed through the Roman Empire; that the Gospels borrowed from it, and not the converse; that Judaic Jesuists adopted it, and gradually interpolated it; and that it is the real foundation of the legend of the twelve Jesuist apostles. The sub-title: "Teaching of [the] Lord through the Twelve Apostles to the Nations" may have been the original. "Lord" here has the force of "God."

On a first study, we found reasons [471] for deciding that the Epistle of Barnabas, which in part closely coincides with the "Teaching," borrows from it, and not the converse. That view, though naturally opposed by many orthodox scholars, who want to date the Teaching as late as possible, was from the first, we find, put by Farrar and by Zahn, and is convincingly maintained by the American editors, though of course they take the conventional view that the document is of Christian origin. Yet its Græco-Jewish origin, we feel certain, will be plain to every open-minded reader at the first perusal. That view was maintained by the Rev. Dr. C. Taylor, of St. John's College, Cambridge, in two lectures given at the Royal Institution in 1886; and it has been accepted by Dr. Salmon in his Introduction to the Study of the New Testament. It was admitted to be probable by the Rev. A. Gordon, in the Modern Review, July, 1884, but rejected by the American editors (1885).

We have followed, with but few serious variations, the translation of the American editors, Professors Hitchcock and Brown, which, on careful comparison, we find to be the most faithful. Reasons for the main variations are given in the notes. Of the elucidatory notes, some are borrowed (with additions) from the American and French editions. The English student may refer to the edition of Professors Hitchcock and Brown, or to that of Canon Spence (1885), for the literature of the matter. Needless to say, the clerical reasoning on the matter must be viewed with constant caution.]

Teaching of the Twelve Apostles

Teaching of [the] Lord, through the Twelve Apostles, to the nations [472]

Chap. I.--Two ways there are, one of life and one of death, and great is the difference between the two ways. [473] The way of life, then, is this: First, thou shalt love the God who made thee; secondly, thy neighbour as thyself; [474] and all things whatsoever thou wouldest not have befall thee, thou, too, do not to another. [475] And of these words the teaching is this: Bless them that curse you, and pray for your enemies, and fast for them that persecute you; [476] for what thank [have ye] if ye love them that love you? Do not foreigners [477] do the same? But love ye them that hate you and ye shall have no enemy. Abstain from the fleshly and worldly lusts. [478] If any one give thee a blow on the right cheek, turn to him the other also, and thou shalt be perfect; [479] if any one compel thee to go one mile, go with him twain; if any one take thy cloak, give him thy tunic also; if any one take from thee what is thine, ask it not back; for indeed thou canst not. [480] To every one that asketh thee give, and ask not back; for to all the Father desireth to have given of his own free gifts. [481] Blessed is he that giveth according to the commandment; for he is guiltless; woe to him that receiveth; [482] for if, indeed, one receiveth who hath need, he shall be guiltless; but he who hath no need shall give account, why he took, and for what purpose, and coming under confinement, [483] shall be examined concerning what he did, and shall not go out thence until he pay the last farthing. And it hath also been said concerning this: Let thine alms sweat in thy hands, until thou knowest to whom thou shouldst give. [484]

Chap. II.--And a second commandment of the teaching is: Thou shalt not kill, nor commit adultery, nor corrupt boys, not commit fornication, nor steal, nor do magic, nor use sorcery, nor slay a child by abortion, nor destroy what is conceived. Thou shalt not lust after the things of thy neighbour, nor forswear thyself, nor bear false witness, nor revile, nor be revengeful, nor be double-minded or double-tongued; for a snare of death is the double tongue. Thy speech shall not be false, nor empty, but filled with doing. Thou shalt not be covetous, nor rapacious, nor a hypocrite, nor malicious, nor arrogant. Thou shalt not take evil counsel against thy neighbour. Thou shalt hate no man, but some thou shalt reprove, and for some thou shalt pray, and some thou shalt love above thy life.

Chap. III.--My child, flee from every evil thing, and from everything like it. Be not wrathful, for anger leadeth to murder; [485] nor a zealot, [486] nor contentious, nor passionate; for of all these murders are begotten. My child, become not lustful; for lust leadeth to fornication; nor foul-mouthed, nor bold of gaze; [487] for of all these things adulteries are begotten. My child, become not an omen-watcher; [488] since it leadeth into idolatry; nor an enchanter, nor an astrologer, nor a purifier, [489] nor be willing to look upon these things; for of all these things idolatry is begotten. My child, become not a liar; since lying leadeth to theft; nor avaricious, nor vain-glorious; for of all these things thefts are begotten. My child, become not a murmurer; since it leadeth to blasphemy; nor self-willed, nor evil-minded; for of all these things blasphemies are begotten. But be meek, since the meek shall inherit the earth. [490] Become long-suffering and merciful and guileless and gentle and good, and tremble continually at the words which thou hast heard. Thou shalt not exalt thyself, nor allow over-boldness to thy soul. Thy soul shall not cleave to the great, [491] but with the righteous and lowly thou shalt consort. The experiences that befall thee shalt thou accept as good, knowing that without God nothing happeneth.

Chap. IV.--My child, him that speaketh to thee the word of God thou shalt remember night and day, [492] and honour him as [the] Lord; for where that which pertaineth to the Lord [493] is spoken there [the] Lord is. And thou shalt seek out daily the faces of the saints, that thou mayest be refreshed by their words. Thou shalt not desire division, but shall make peace between those who contend; thou shalt judge justly; thou shalt not respect persons in reproving for transgressions. Thou shalt not hesitate [494] whether it shall be or not. Be not one who for receiving stretcheth out the hands, but for giving draweth them in; if thou hast anything, by thy hands thou shalt give a ransom for thy sins. [495] Thou shalt not hesitate to give, nor when giving shalt thou murmur, for thou shalt know who is the good dispenser of the recompense. Thou shalt not turn away from the needy, but shalt share all things with thy brother, and shalt not say they are thine own; for if ye are partners in that which is imperishable, how much more in the perishable things? [496] Thou shalt not take off thy hand from thy son and from thy daughter, [497] but from youth shalt thou teach them the fear of God. Thou shalt not lay commands in thy bitterness upon thy slave or girl-slave, who hope in the same God, lest they perchance shall not fear the God over you both; for he cometh not to call men according to the appearance, but to those whom the spirit hath prepared. And ye, slaves, ye shall be subject to your lords, as to God's image, [498] in modesty and fear. Thou shalt hate every hypocrisy, and whatever is not pleasing to the Lord. Thou shalt by no means forsake [the] Lord's commandments, but shall keep what thou hast received, neither adding to it nor taking from it. In church thou shalt confess thy transgressions, and shalt not draw near for thy prayer with an evil conscience. This is the way of life.

Chap. V.--But the way of death is this: First of all it is evil, and full of curse; murders, adulteries, lusts, fornications, thefts, idolatries, magic arts, sorceries, robberies, false testimonies, hypocrisies, duplicity, guile, arrogance, malice, self-will, greed, foul speech, jealousy, [499] over-boldness, haughtiness, boasting; persecutors of the good, hating truth, loving falsehood, knowing not the reward of righteousness, not cleaving to that which is good nor to righteous judgment, on the watch not for good but for evil; far from whom are meekness and patience; loving vanities, seeking reward, [500] not pitying a poor man, not grieving with one [501] in distress, not knowing him that made them, murderers of children, destroyers of God's image, [502] turning away from the needy, oppressing the afflicted, advocates of the rich, lawless judges of the poor, universal sinners; may ye be delivered, children, from all these.

Chap. VI.--See that no one lead thee astray from this way of the teaching, because apart from God doth he teach thee. For if thou art able to bear the whole yoke of the Lord, thou shalt be perfect; but if thou art not able, what thou art able that do. And concerning food, what thou art able, bear; but of that offered to idols, beware exceedingly; for it is a worship of dead Gods.

[It will be observed that while there is a very marked transition after ch. vi, a division may be held to begin after ch. v. In this connection may be noted an interesting fact, brought out by the Rev. A. Gordon in his examination of the Didachê. Nicephoros of Constantinople (fl. 750-820) knew of a certain Teaching of the Apostles, which he mentioned as containing 200 lines. Nicephoros also speaks of the combined lengths of the two Epistles of Clement as amounting to 2,600 lines. Now, in the Jerusalem MS., which is closely written, the Clementine Epistles occupy only 1,200 lines, which would give for the Didachê, in the same writing, on the proportions mentioned by Nicephoros, only 92 lines, whereas it occupies 203. Mr. Gordon simply noted the fact as a difficulty. If however he had followed up his own observation that the Didachê shows a division after the fifth chapter, he would have found that the proportion of the first five sections to the rest is nearly as 86 to 203; while with ch. vi we should have a still closer approximation--88 to 203. We have here, then, a virtual proof that Nicephoros had before him only these first five or six chapters, and that the subsequent additions were not to be found in all copies of the Teaching. The inference from the internal evidence is thus remarkably confirmed. The original Teaching, once more, was a purely Jewish document, without even a mention of Jesus.

It will be noted further that, while the first six chapters contain no suggestion of anything beyond simple monotheism and general ethics, and the sixth chapter ends with a warning against eating food offered to idols, the seventh suddenly plunges into a prescription of baptism, which introduces the formula of "the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit," and minutely provides for the manner of the ceremony. But the eighth chapter evidently connects directly with the sixth, a direction as to fasting following on the warning in that section against eating meat offered to idols. It is thus perfectly clear that the entire Trinitarian section on baptism is an interpolation. In the eighth chapter, again, we have an interpolation of the words "as the Lord commanded in his gospel." In C.M. (415 sq.) are set forth the weighty reasons for concluding that the Lord's prayer, which is lacking in Mark, and different in Luke, was a Jewish formula long before the Christian era.

While the Christist interpolations are thus obvious after the sixth chapter, it is not here assumed that the first six chapters as they stand are a single original document. On the contrary, we are inclined to think that the scheme of the "two ways" is itself a redaction of an original document which gave the first "way" without preamble, the present preamble and the fifth chapter being inserted to give the dual form. On that view, the pre-Christian document may not have stopped with the sixth chapter, though the definitely Christian redaction begins with the seventh, as the document now stands. The Trinitarian seventh chapter was almost certainly one of the latest of the Christian additions. In the ninth, rules are laid down for the Eucharist without any allusion to the Godhead of Jesus, who is spoken of in Ebionitic terms as "Jesus thy servant," though Jesus Christ is further on spoken of in more distinctly Christist terms. These are evidently further additions. In the tenth chapter the Ebionitic tone is resumed, Jesus being still only "thy servant"; while throughout the rest of the document there is much teaching that might have come from the Judaic apostles who propagated that of the earlier chapters. As to this, however, it is difficult to come to a definite conclusion. All that is certain is that the nucleus of the document was Judaic, and that the Christian tamperings were made at different stages, the earlier indicating the primary Ebionitic creed, in which Jesus was merely a holy man, no more God than any other "Anointed."]

Chap. VII.--Now concerning baptism, thus baptise ye: having first uttered all these things, baptise into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, in living water. But if thou hast not living water, [503] baptise in other water; and if thou canst not in cold, [then] in warm. But if thou hast neither, pour water upon the head thrice, [504] into the name of Father and Son and Holy Spirit. But before the baptism let the baptiser and baptised fast, and whatever others can; but the baptised thou shalt command to fast for one or two days before.

Chap. VIII.--But let not your fastings be in common with the hypocrites; for they fast on the second day of the week and on the fifth; [505] but do ye fast during the fourth, and the preparation [day]. [506] Nor pray ye like the hypocrites, but as the Lord [507] commanded in his gospel, thus pray: Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth; our daily bread give us to-day, and forgive us our debt as we also forgive our debtors, and bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil; for thine is the power and the glory forever. Three times in the day pray ye thus.

Chap. IX.--Now, concerning the Eucharist, [508] thus give thanks: first, concerning the cup: We thank thee, our Father, for the holy vine of David [509] thy servant, which thou hast made known to us through Jesus thy servant; [510] to thee be the glory for ever. And concerning the broken [bread]: We thank thee, our Father, for the life and knowledge which thou hast made known to us through Jesus thy servant; to thee be the glory for ever. [511] Just as this broken [bread] was scattered over the hills and having been gathered together became one, so let thy church be gathered from the ends of the earth into thy kingdom; for thine is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ forever.[3] But let no one eat or drink of your Eucharist, except those baptised into the name of [the] Lord; for in regard to this the Lord hath said: Give not that which is holy to the dogs. [512]

Chap. X.--Now after ye are filled [513] thus do ye give thanks: We thank thee, holy Father, for thy holy name, which thou hast caused to dwell in our hearts, and for the knowledge and faith and immortality which thou hast made known to us through Jesus thy servant; to thee be the glory forever. Thou, Sovereign [514] Almighty, didst create all things for thy name's sake; both food and drink thou didst give to men for enjoyment, that they might give thanks to thee; but to us thou hast graciously given spiritual food and drink and eternal life through thy servant. Before all things we thank thee that thou art mighty; to thee be the glory for ever. Remember, Lord, thy Church, to deliver it from every evil and to make it perfect in thy love, and gather it from the four winds, [it] the sanctified, into thy kingdom, which thou hast prepared for it; for thine is the power and the glory forever. Let grace come and let this world pass away. Hos-anna to the God [515] of David! Whoever is holy, let him come, whoever is not, let him repent. Maranatha. [516] Amen. But permit the prophets to give thanks as much as they will.

Chap. XI.--Now, whoever cometh and teacheth you all these things aforesaid, receive him; but if the teacher himself turn aside and teach another teaching, so as to overthrow [this], do not hear him; but [if he teach] so as to promote righteousness and knowledge of [the] Lord, receive him as [the] Lord. Now in regard to the apostles and prophets, according to the ordinance of the Gospel, so do ye. And every apostle who cometh to you, let him be received as [the] Lord; but he shall not remain [except for?] one day; if, however, there be need, then the next [day]; but if he remain three days, he is a false prophet. [517] But when the apostle departeth, let him take nothing except bread enough till he lodge [again]; but if he ask money, he is a false prophet. And every prophet who speaketh in the spirit, ye shall not try nor judge; for every sin shall be forgiven, but this sin shall not be forgiven. [518] But not every one that speaketh in the spirit is a prophet; but [only] if he have the ways of [the] Lord. So from their ways shall the false prophet and the prophet be known. And no prophet appointing a table [519] in the spirit, eateth of it, unless indeed he is a false prophet; and every prophet who teacheth the truth, if he do not that which he teacheth, is a false prophet. But every prophet, tried, true, acting with a view to the mystery of the Church on earth, [520] but not teaching [others] to do all that he himself doeth, shall not be judged among you; for with God he hath his judgment; for so did the ancient prophets also. But whoever, in the spirit, saith: Give me money, or something else, ye shall not hear him; but if for others in need he bids [you] give, let none judge him.

Chap. XII.--And let every one that cometh in [the] Lord's name be received, but afterwards ye shall test and know him; for ye shall have understanding, right and left. If he who cometh is a wayfarer, help him as much as ye can; but he shall not remain with you, unless for two or three days, if there be necessity. But if he will take up his abode among you, being a craftsman, let him work and so eat; but if he have no craft, provide, according to your understanding; that no idler live with you as a Christian. But if he will not act according to this, he is a Christmonger; [521] beware of such.

Chap. XIII.--But every true prophet who will settle among you is worthy of his food. Likewise a true teacher, he also is worthy, like the workman, of his food. [522] Every firstfruit, then, of the produce of wine-press and threshing-floor, of oxen and of sheep, thou shalt take and give to the prophets; for they are your high-priests. But if ye have no prophet, give [it] to the poor. If thou makest a baking of bread, take the first [of it] and give according to the commandment. In like manner when thou openest a jar of wine or oil, take the first [of it] and give to the prophets; and of money and clothing and every possession, take the first, as may seem right to thee, and give according to the commandment.

Chap. XIV.--And on the Lord's-day of [the] Lord [523] being assembled, break bread, and give thanks, after confessing your transgressions, in order that your sacrifice may be pure. But any one that hath variance with his friend, let him not come together with you, until they be reconciled, that your sacrifice may not be defiled. For this is that which was spoken by [the] Lord: [524] At every place and time, bring me a pure sacrifice; for a great king am I, saith [the] Lord, and my name is marvellous among the nations. [525]

Chap. XV.--Now elect for yourselves bishops and deacons worthy of the Lord, men meek and not avaricious, and upright and proved; for they, too, render you the service [526] of the prophets and the teachers. Therefore neglect them not; for they are the ones who are honoured of you, together with the prophets and teachers.

And reprove one another, not in anger, but in peace, as ye have [it] in the gospel; and to every one who erreth against another, let no one speak, nor let him hear [anything] from you, until he repent. But your prayers and your alms and all your deeds so do ye, as ye have [it] in the gospel of our [527] Lord.

Chap. XVI.--Watch for your life; let not your lamps be gone out, and let not your loins be loosed, but be ready; for ye know not the hour in which our Lord cometh. But ye shall come together often, and seek the things which befit your souls; for the whole time of your faith will not profit you, if ye be not made perfect in the last season. For in the last days the false prophets and the corruptors shall be multiplied, and the sheep shall be turned into wolves, and love shall be turned into hate; for when lawlessness increaseth they shall hate one another, and shall persecute and shall deliver up; and then shall appear the world-deceiver as the Son of God, [528] and shall do signs and wonders, and the earth shall be given unto his hands, and he shall commit iniquities which have never yet been done since the beginning. Then all created men shall come into the fire of trial, and many shall be made to stumble and shall perish. But they that endure in their faith shall be saved from under even this curse. And then shall appear the signs of truth; first the sign of an opening [529] in heaven, then the sign of a trumpet's voice, and thirdly, the resurrection of the dead; yet not of all, [530] but as it hath been said: The Lord will come and all the saints with him. Then shall the world see the Lord coming upon the clouds of heaven.

APPENDIX B

THE MYTH OF SIMON MAGUS

I

Two questions are raised under this heading--the question whether, as was argued by F. C. Baur, the "Simon Magus" of the "Clementine Recognitions" and "Homilies" is a mask-name for a polemic directed primarily at the Apostle Paul; and the more fundamental question whether the Simon Magus of the Acts is or is not a historical character.

The reasons for holding Simon to be a mythical personage (as apart from the reasons for supposing the Clementine Simon to be meant for Paul, and the story of the Acts to be a misconceiving adaptation of the Clementine narrative) are overwhelming. To begin with, Justin Martyr, a Samaritan born, expressly says [531] that almost all the Samaritans worshipped Simon. [532] This alone might dispose of the notion that the "Simonians" dated merely from the time of Paul and Peter. It is absurd to suppose that nearly all the Samaritans, a people with old cults, could be converted within a century to a new Deity originating in one man. The cult must date further back than that. And that Justin, though of Samaritan birth, could widely misconceive the cults around him, is pretty clear from his famous blunder of finding his Simon Magus as Simo Sanctus in the Semo Sancus of Rome, the old Sabine counterpart of the Eastern Semo. [533]

For there is abundant evidence, to begin with, that a name of which the basis is Sem is one of the oldest of Semitic God-names. We have the forms Shem, Sime-on, Sams-on, S(h)amas (the Babylonian name of the sun; Hebrew Shemesh), San-d-on, or Samdan [534] Semen and Sem, all plainly connected with a sun-myth. Shamas or Samas was an Assyrian Sun-God, the duplicate of Melkarth and Hercules. Samson or Simson or Shimshai (= the Sun-man), the Hebrew Sun-hero, is unquestionably a mere variant of that myth. Sand-on, also a Sun-God, is the same myth over again. Baal-Samen, "the Lord of Heaven," [535] is the same conception as Baal-Melkarth; Baal, "the Lord," a Sun-God himself as well as Supreme God, being joined with the Sun-God proper. The name Sem, again, is found as signifying Hercules, in conjunction with those of Harpocrates and the Egyptian Hermes, [536] and is probably involved in the mythical queen-name Semiramis (Sammuramat), since she in one of the myths gets her name from Simmas, "keeper of the king's flocks," who rears her [537]--another form of the Sun-God, belike. Simeon, in the myth of the twelve tribes, is one of the twin-brethren, who in all mythologies are at bottom solar deities. The "on" means "great," as in Samson, Dagon, Solomon, etc.; [538] and the Dioscuri of the Greek and Roman myth were "the Great Twin Brethren." It was added to the name of the Samaritan God Êl Êlyon, "Great Êl," [539] who is just the Êl (singular of Elohim) of the Hebrews. But the name Shem itself means "the Lofty"; [540] and the name of the mythical ancestor of the Shemites is at bottom a God-name, just as are those of Noach, Abram, Jacob, and Isra-el. It may also, it appears, have had the significance of "red-shining." [541] And, last but not least, the same vocable also has the significance of "name," so that the Semites or sons of S(h)em were also "the men with names" [542]; and the Hebrew "Shem hemmaphorash" or Tetragrammaton was the name of four letters (IEUE = Yahweh) or "the peculiar name." [543] Lenormant declares [544] that this last tenet came from Chaldea, where "they considered the divine name, the Shem, as endowed with properties so special and individual that they succeeded in making of it a distinct person." But this idea of the sacredness of the God-name was one of the most prevalent of ancient religious notions. It was still devoutly held by the Christian Origen, who argued [545] that the Hebrew divine names must be held to because they alone were potent to conjure with. It appears in the Judaic Teaching of the Twelve Apostles in its Christianised form (c. x), in the passage of thanksgiving beginning, "We thank thee, holy Father, for thy holy name, which thou hast made to dwell in our hearts." In the Jewish Sepher Toledoth Jeschu, Jesus is made to do his magic works by virtue of the "Shem hemmaphorash," the Tetragrammaton, of which he has furtively possessed himself. Thus could an ancient God-name retain its mysterious prestige even after the mystery-mongers (reversing the process imagined by Lenormant) had taken the name-quality out of it, and left only the word for "name." In other ways it clung to the Jewish cult. It is highly probable that the pre-eminent Jewish prayer, the "Shema" (or the "Shemoneh Esreh"), of which the name is explained away into insignificance, is an extremely ancient prayer to the Sun-God. [546] Even this is sought to be connected with a historical "Simon." [547] And all the while the original God Sem survives in the Jewish mythology as "Shamma-el," the Prince of Demons and angel of death, who has power over all peoples except the Jews; [548] and at the same time in the legend of Samu-el, the unshorn, the child of the heretofore sterile mother (vexed by her rival as Rachel by Leah), the potentate who makes and unmakes kings, and who is called up as a "God" [549] from the earth by incantation.

But all this connects decisively with Samaria. It is not improbable that the name Samaria itself was derived from the name of the Sun-God, it being very much more likely that the mountain would be named from the God who was worshipped on it than from a man Shemer. [550] The last is obviously a worthless gloss. A reasonable alternative view is that as the God-name Asshur is identified with the name of the Assyrian country and people, whether giving or following their race-name, so the Semitic God-name Shem is bound up with the name Samaria, as that of Athênê with Athens. It is at all events clear that, as is claimed by Volkmar, [551] Sem or Simon was the chief God of the Samaritans. They declared to Antiochus, according to Josephus, [552] that their temple on Mount Gerizim had no name, but was that of "the greatest God"; and this squares with the other evidence, whether or not it be true that they offered, as Josephus states, to dedicate the temple to Zeus of the Hellenes. For, S(h)em being "the high," Sem-on would be the Great High One or Greatest God, just as Êl Êlyon was the great Êl, the Great Power, Greatest of Powers. And as Sem-on was also the Great Name, the God was in that sense without a name, which circumstance is the explanation of the otherwise pointless phrase of the Johannine Jesus (John iv, 22) to the Samaritan woman, "Ye worship that which ye know not what." And all the ideas converge in the phrases in the Acts (viii, 9-10), that Simon claimed to be "some great one" (heauton megan) and was spoken of as "that power of God which is called Great." In fine, Simon Magus, the Mage, is just a version of Simon Megas, Great Simon.

We know from their version of the Pentateuch that the later Samaritans, being strong "monotheists" in one of the senses of that elastic and misleading term, sought always to substitute angels for Elohim in the old narratives of divine action (e. g. Gen. iii, 5; v, 1; v, 24; xvii, 22), "lest a corporeal existence should be attributed to the Deity." [553] And it is instructive to note how their theological drift exhibits itself in early Christism. The doctrine of the "Logos" is not merely Alexandrian-Christian, it is Judaic. Some of the Aramaic paraphrasts of the Old Testament at times wrote "the Word of Jehovah" instead of the angel of Jehovah, sometimes the "She-kin-ah," which means "the abode of the Word of Jehovah." [554] On the other hand, we know from the Gospel of Peter that one of the early Christian sects regarded Jesus as having received his dynamis, his power, at baptism, and yielded it up at crucifixion. Here we are close to Samaritanism, in which the angels were regarded [555] as "uncreated influences proceeding from God (dynameis, powers)," pretty much as Simon is described in the Acts. Thus "Simon" for the Samaritans would just be "Êl," which the Samaritan Justin, like the writer of "Peter," held to mean "Power." And at the same time, be it observed, Simon was "the Word."

But still the proof abounds. In Lucian's account of the Syrian Goddess we are told [556] that in the temple at Byblos there was a statue, apparently epicene or double-sexed, called by some Dionysos, by others Deucalion, and by others Semiramis, but to which the Syrians gave no specific name, calling it only Semeion, a word which in Greek properly means "sign," but may mean image. There can be little doubt that Movers [557] was right in surmising this statue to be just the primordial Sem or Sem-on, the Great Sem of the Semitic race. The two-sexed character is in perfect keeping with the ideal duality of the old Assyrian Nature-Gods; [558] and the peculiar detail of the name which was not a name brings us again to the Sem-on of the Samaritans.

Everything in the Christian legend falls in with this identification. The Fathers [559] tell us of one Helen, a prostitute from Tyre, with whom Simon went about, and whom he gave out to be a reincarnation of Helen of Troy, and also his "Thought." Helen is almost unquestionably, as Baur [560] surmised, the Selene or Luna of the old sun-cultus. In the paragraph following his account of the Semeion, Lucian tells us that in the forepart of the same temple stands the throne of Helios, but without a statue; Helios and Selene, the sun and moon, being the only divinities not sculptured in the temple--though he goes on to mention that behind the throne is a statue of a clothed and bearded Apollo, quite different from the Greek form. Here, again, we have a mystic conception of the Sun-God, a conception necessarily confusing to ordinary visitors, even supposing the priests themselves to have had any consistent ideas about it; and the fact [561] that the temple further contained among other statues one of Helena (herself an old Moon-Goddess), gave ample opportunity for the usual mythological variants. Thus it came about that while Justin and Irenæus connect Simon Magus with Helen, Irenæus says the Simonians have "an image of Simon in the likeness of Jupiter, and of Helen in that of Minerva"--a curious statement, which at once recalls that of Lucian [562] that the Hêrê of the temple of Byblos "has something of Athênê and Aphrodite, of Selene and Rhea, of Artemis, of Nemesis, and of the Parcæ." This again squares with the fact that in the Chaldeo-Babylonian system Samas was associated with the goddess Gula, "triform as personating the moon, and sometimes replaced by a group of three spouses of equal rank, Malkit, Gula, and Anunit." [563] And in the Latin translation by Rufinus of the pseudo-Clementine "Recognitions," for Helena we actually have Luna.

The chain is complete. We are dealing not with a historic person or persons, but with an ancient cult, which Christian ignorance and Judaic "monotheism" between them strove to reduce somehow to a historical narrative, as the myths of Abraham and Samson and Israel and Elijah and a dozen others had been reduced, as the mythic ritual had been in the gospels, and as indeed the rituals of Paganism had been in the current pagan mythologies. There was no Samaritan Simon the Mage, who met a Christian Peter; it was not a preaching Simon who taught of himself, but the Samaritan populace who traditionally believed of their God Sem or Simon, that "he appeared among the Jews as the Son, while in Samaria he descended as the Father, and in the rest of the nations he came as the Holy Spirit." [564] The parallel holds down to the last jot. The Semeion of the temple of Byblos had a dove on his head, [565] and there are abundant Jewish charges as to the worship of a dove by the Samaritans at Mount Gerizim; [566] so that Simon was the Logos receiving the Holy Spirit, the dynamis, just as Jesus did in the Gospels; and the Christists' doctrine that the Holy Spirit should be given to the nations is simply an adaptation of the Samaritan syncretism, which they sought to override by a syncretism of their own in their latest gospel, where it comes out that their Galilean Jesus was called a Samaritan by Jews, [567] a charge which curiously enough he does not dispute, denying only that he has "a daimon." This is exactly the myth of Simon turned into a story of an incarnate Messiah, who affirms his reality. [568] Well might the Fathers call their imaginary "Simon" the Father of all heresies. He was the "Father" in a sense of their own creed, as well as of all the Gnosticisms into which it broke.

II

What hinders ordinary students from accepting Baur's view of the "Clementine" Simon, which we have here sought to support, is the existence of the fragments of writings attributed to Simon, together with the circumstantialities of the story in the Acts and the Fathers. But these circumstantialities are just the marks of all the ancient myths, Jewish, Christian, and Gentile; and the attribution of writings to Simon Magus no more proves his historical existence than the same process proves the historical existence of Orpheus and Moses. [569] The fragments and paraphrases preserved by the Fathers are just part of the mass of ancient Occultism; and their connection with the name of Simon the Mage is merely a variation of the Jewish myth which attributes the authorship of the Zohar to Simon Ben Jochaï, a mythical or mythicised personage if ever there was one. He is fabled to have lived in a cave for twelve years, studying the Cabbala, during which time he was visited by Elias. At his death fire was seen in the cave, and a voice from heaven was heard saying, "Come ye to the marriage of Simon Ben Jochaï: he is entering into peace, and shall rest in his chamber." At his burial there was heard a voice crying, "This is he who caused the earth to quake and the kingdoms to shake." [570] Simon is said to have belonged to the first century of the Christian era; while the Zohar is held to have been composed in the 13th century. [571] In all probability the matter of the Zohar is largely ancient; and the association of it (as of the Shema or Shemoneh Esreh prayer) with the name Simon points distinctly to a traditional vogue of the name in Semitic Gnosticism. But there is no more reason to believe that an actual Simon composed the Zohar, or the "Great Denial" (perhaps = antinomy) attributed to Simon the Mage, than to believe in the above stories of the voices from heaven and those of the miracles of the Mage in the Acts. The Talmudic legends clearly point to a sun myth, bringing Simon into connection with Elias, Eli-jah, an unquestionable Sun-God, who combines the names El and Jah, though reduced by the Judaic Evemerising monotheists to the rank of a judge-prophet, as was Samu-el, and as Sams-on was made a "judge." It lay in the essence of ancient religiosity to do this, and at the same time to seek to father all its documents on sacrosanct names. That a real Samaritan Simon of the first century should write a new occultist book and publish it as his own, is contrary to the whole spirit of the time. Only centuries after the period of its composition could such a book be attributed to an ordinary human author by those who accepted it. If it was current in the first century, it must have been either fathered on an ancient and mythical Simon or regarded as a book of the mysteries of the God Simon. The opinions or statements of the Christian Fathers concerning it are quite worthless save as embodying a name-tradition.

III

There remains to be considered the theory of the Tübingen school that the Christian legend of Simon Magus is to be found in its earliest form in the "Clementines," that body of early sectarian forged literature which has been made to yield so much light as to the early history of the Christist Church. Here, in a set of writings ("Recognitions" and "Homilies," of which books one is a redaction of the other), purporting to be by Clement of Rome, we have a propaganda that is on the face of it strongly Petrine, and that turns out on analysis to be strongly anti-Pauline, though the gist of the matter is a series of disputations between Peter and Simon the Mage. It is impossible at present to settle what was the first form of these documents, which as they stand bear marks of the third century, and survive only in the Latin translation of Rufinus (d. 410); but it is plain that they preserve elements of the early Ebionitic or Judæo-Christian opposition to the Gentile Christism of Paul. The Tübingen theory is that under the name of Simon Magus Paul is attacked throughout. This, at first sight, certainly seems a fantastic thesis; but an examination of the matter shows that it is very strongly founded. A leading feature in the conduct of Simon Magus in the Clementines, as in the Acts, is his attempt to purchase apostleship with money. Now, this corresponds very closely with the act of Paul in bringing to Jerusalem a subsidy from the Western churches, an act which, on the part of one not recognised as an apostle, and exhibited in the Epistles as always on jealous terms [572] with the Jerusalem apostles, would naturally rank as an attempt to purchase the Holy Ghost with lucre. Again, Simon Magus in the Clementines claims to rest his authority on divine visions, which is exactly the position of Paul; [573] and Peter denies that visions have such authority. Once recognise the primary strife between Judaising and Gentilising Christians, of which there are so many traces in New Testament and Patristic literature, and it is easy to see that these are the very points on which the anti-Paulinists would most bitterly oppose Paul and his movement. In the Clementines, Peter not only opposes the Magus in Palestine, but follows him to Rome, thus carrying the antagonism between the two sects over the whole theoretic field. The fact that both Simon Peter and Simon Magus, Cephas and Paul, are made to journey from East to West, and to die in the West, like the immemorial Sun-God, is suggestive.

That the Judaists should give Paul a symbolical name, again, was quite in keeping with the usual dialectic of the time, in which Rome, for instance, figured as "Babylon," the typical great hostile city of Jewish remembrance. Just as Babylon symbolised heathen oppression, Samaria typified heathen heresy, the divergence from the Jewish cult in a heathen direction. Such divergence was the Judaist gravamen against Paul, who broke away from the law; and as Simon, Semo, typified Samaritan heresy in general, it was peculiarly suited to the arch-heretic who sought to overthrow the supreme privilege of Jerusalem. Simon was the Samaritan "false Christ," and Paul's preaching falsified the Judaic Christ. [574] And nothing is more remarkable in the matter than the way in which the plainly patched-up reconciliatory narrative of the Acts squares with this theory. The book of Acts is explicable only on the hypothesis that it was designed, in its final form, to reconcile the long-opposed sects by reconciling Peter and Paul in a quasi-historical narrative. The narrative plainly clashes with Paul's alleged Epistles. For the rest, it is managed largely on the plan of duplicating the exploits of the two heroes, so that Paul confutes Elymas as Peter does Simon, and closely duplicates one of Peter's miracles. [575] Some legends were in existence to start with, and others were invented to match them. Similarly the dispute between Paul and Barnabas at Antioch was to supersede the strife there between Paul and Peter. [576] If then the composer of the Acts had before him a legend of Peter confuting Simon the Mage, it would suit him to retain it, since thus would he best dissociate the Mage from Paul. But, as Zeller points out, he is careful, first of all, to place the story of the Mage before Paul's conversion; and at the same time he shows he knows the original significance of the charge against Simon Magus as to offering money, by ignoring the most important of Paul's subsidies. [577]

The application of a great mass of the polemic against Simon Magus in the Clementines is so obvious that the evasion of the problem by Harnack and Salmon and others on futile pleas of "false appearances" and "common-sense" is simply a confession of defeat. Baur's case, after being dismissed on pretexts of "common-sense" by those who could not meet it, is irresistibly restated by Schmiedel, on a full survey of its development by Lipsius and others. The only solution is, that the Clementines adapt for new purposes a mass of old anti-Pauline matter. At the time at which they were redacted, Paul had been established as a "catholic" figure; and there could be no such hatred to him as breathes through the fierce impeachments of the teaching of the Paulines in the Recognitions and Homilies. For it is at the Epistles that the bulk of the attacks are directed. What has been done is to use up, for a new polemic with heretics, a quantity of old anti-Pauline literature in which the disguising of Paul under the name of Simon Magus probably blinded the redactors to its purpose. For them Simon was simply the arch-heretic, and it was against his detested memory and persisting influence that they operated.

The theory is no doubt a complicated one; but when taken in its full extent, as recognising the addition of the heresy of the Gnostic Paulinist Marcion to that of Paul, it is perfectly consistent with the documents; and there is really no other view worth discussing, as regards the connection of Simon Magus with Peter. The orthodox belief that Simon was an actual Samaritan who suddenly persuaded the people of Samaria to regard him as a divine incarnation, as told in the Acts, will not explain the mass of identities in the Clementines between the teaching ascribed to him and the actual Pauline Epistles. In explaining the choice of the name Simon for Paul by his Judaic antagonists, the myth-theory is far more helpful than the view of Simon's historicity. A "false God" Simon, the God of the typically misbelieving Samaritans, would be by Jews reduced to human status as a matter of course, unless he were simply classed as a "daimon." A "Simon the Mage" was for them just the type they wanted wherewith to identify Paul, the new False Teacher. To identify, on the other hand, a contemporary or lately deceased Paul with a contemporary or lately deceased Simon would be an idle device, missing the end in view. The name of such a Simon would for purposes of aspersion be worth little or nothing. The name had to be a widely and long notorious one, and the myth supplied it.

IV

In conclusion, let it be noted that the bearing of the myth of Simon Magus on Christianity is not limited to the explanation of the Samaritan origins and the elucidation of the Paul-and-Peter antagonism. The more the matter is looked into, the more reason is seen for surmising that Samaria played a large part in the beginnings of the Christian system. Samaria seems to have been beyond all other parts of Palestine a crucible in which manifold cult-elements tended to be fused by syncretic ideas; and the extent to which Samaria figures in the fourth gospel is a phenomenon not yet adequately explained. The fact that Jesus is there said to have been called a Samaritan reminds us that among the movements of the "false Christs" so often alluded to in the Gospels [578] a Samaritan cult of the mystic Christ may have counted for much. The fourth gospel itself would come under the anti-Pauline ban, inasmuch as, while Simon Magus is said to have sought to substitute Mount Gerizim for Jerusalem, Jesus here [579] is made to set aside both the Samaritan mountain and Jerusalem. The very fact that the Samaritan woman professedly expects the coming of Messiah, is a hint that the story of the well and the living water may be of Samaritan Messianic origin. Nay more, since we know that the Samaritans in particular laid stress on the Messiah Ben Joseph rather than on the Messiah Ben David, they regarding themselves as of Josephite descent, it is probable that the very legend of Jesus being the putative son of one Joseph, which we know was absent from the Ebionite version of Matthew, was framed to meet the Samaritan view. These matters are still far from having been exhaustively considered.

NOTES

[1] The charge of haste is posited as a preliminary to criticism by the Rev. Dr. Thorburn in his work on The Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels. Some examples of Dr. Thorburn's own haste will be found in the following pages.

[2] Twenty years ago a French scholar gently included me in this reproach.

[3] I omit personalities.

[4] Art. by H. G. Wood in The Cambridge Magazine, Jan. 1917.

[5] Cp. H.J. 128-139.

[6] In the course of a second attack, the critic avows that he knows of "no theory of gospel-origins, living or dead," which concedes that the tragedy-story was added to the gospels as a separate block. Reminded that the school of B. Weiss make their "Primitive Gospel" end before the tragedy, he replies in a third attack that that school is "obsolete"--i. e. neither living nor dead?

[7] It seems to have been the view of Mr. Cassels.

[8] Art. Gospels in Encyc. Bibl., ii, col. 1869.

[9] Ecce Deus, p. 93.

[10] Historical Christ, p. 182.

[11] Ecce Deus, pref. p. ix.

[12] Dr. Conybeare, The Historical Christ, p. 5.

[13] H.J. 112, 113, 128, 157 sq., 177 sq.

[14] Hist. of Greece, 10 vol. ed. 1888, ii, 462.

[15] Id. p. 500.

[16] Gesch. des Alterthums, ii (1893), 649. See the context for the historic basis in general.

[17] Id. 427, 564.

[18] Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 2nd ed. p. 91. Cp. 93 sq.

[19] Id. p. 100. Cp. 106-7, 123.

[20] Id. p. 105. Cp. 109.

[21] P.C. 274 sq. A proselytizing Catholic Professor in Glasgow has represented me as denying the historicity of Apollonius, having reached that opinion by intuition.

[22] The Bhagavat Gîta, which glorifies Krishna, is late relatively to the cult.

[23] Cp. Gunkel, Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis des N.T., 1903, p. 5 sq.

[24] Apropos d'histoire des religions, p. 290.

[25] Jesus, by William Renton. Pub. by author, Keswick, 1879.

[26] Rep. by R.P.A. 1907.

[27] The Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels, 1916.

[28] E. g. He takes as applying to Jesus (p. 377) a remark applied expressly and solely to the myth of Herakles.

[29] Work cited, p. 10.

[30] Second Leben Jesu, § 91 (3te Aufl. p. 569).

[31] See refs. in Drews, The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus, Eng. trans. p. 23.

[32] As cited, p. 572.

[33] Jesus and Israel, Eng. tr., pp. viii, ix, 29.

[34] Putnams, 1912. I had not met with this work when I chose my own title, The Historical Jesus, else I should have framed another.

[35] Work cited, pp. 335-353.

[36] Williams and Norgate, 1895.

[37] Work cited, p. 420.

[38] Id. p. 17, etc.

[39] The Historic Jesus, p. vii.

[40] In this connection he puts the theory--derived from the celebrated Herr Chamberlain--that Jesus was not a Jew but an "Amorite."

[41] H.J. chs. xvii and xix.

[42] H.J. 199. On this compare The Four Gospels as Historical Records, chs. vi-xiii.

[43] Canon Cheetham, Hulsean Lectures on The Mysteries, 1897, p. 115.

[44] "The primitive idea of the sacrificial meal, namely, that it is by participation in the blood of the god that the spirit of the god enters into his worshipper."--Prof. Jevons, Introd. to the Hist. of Religion, 1896, p. 291. "Originally the death of the god was nothing else than the death of the theanthropic victim."--Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 1889, p. 394.

[45] Jésus et la tradition évangélique, 1910, p. 106.

[46] H.J. 202-3.

[47] Loisy, p. 171.

[48] See refs. in H.J. 171; others in G.B. ix. 420 n. An overwhelming case for the reading "Jesus (the) Barabbas" is established by E. B. Nicholson, The Gospel according to the Hebrews, 1879, pp. 141-2.

[49] Mr. Lester translates "Son of a Teacher," but this (adopted by Brandt) is an evasive rendering. He thinks the story, even if true, had no connection with the condemnation of Jesus.

[50] Cp. Nicholson, as cited, p. 142.

[51] G.B. ix, 418; P.C. 146.

[52] G.B. ix, 419.

[53] Id. iv, ch. vi; P.C. 124.

[54] P.C. 152, 64; G.B. iv (Pt. III, The Dying God), 170 sq.

[55] P.C. 161. Cp. Turner, Samoa, 1884, 274-5; G.B. iv, ch. vi.

[56] P.C. 137, 161, 186; G.B. iv (Pt. III), 166.

[57] Macrobius, Saturnalia, i, 7. Cp. Varro, cit. by Lactantius, Div. Inst. i, 21.

[58] G.B. iv, 14 sq., 46 sq., x, 1 sq.

[59] Cp. Ward's View of the Religion of the Hindoos, 5th ed. 1863, p. 92.

[60] See P.C. 105 sq. as to the various motives of human sacrifice.

[61] Livy, viii, 9, 10; Lafcadio Hearn, Japan, 166; P.C., 138.

[62] Cp. Kalisch, Comm. on Leviticus, 1867, i, 366; P.C. 121.

[63] Robertson Smith, Semites, 391; F. B. Jevons, Introd. to Hist. of Religion, pp. 274-93.

[64] P.C. 363.

[65] Id. 108 sq.

[66] Cp. G.B. Pt. III, The Dying God (vol. iv), 166 n., 214 sq.; P.C. 116-117, 140.

[67] P.C. 364-8.

[68] Cp. Kalisch, as cited; G.B., as last cited; Ps. 106, etc.

[69] P.C. 158 sq. Hebrews, ix, 7, 25, suggests a cryptic meaning for the sacrifice of atonement.

[70] As to Hebrew private sacraments, see P.C. 168 sq.

[71] P.C. 166. I do not find that Mr. R. T. Herford deals with this matter in his valuable work on Christianity in Talmud and Midrash, 1903.

[72] See below, p. 104, as to the inferrible early forms of the propaganda of the crucifixion.

[73] Mr. Joseph McCabe (Sources of Gospel Morality, p. 21) argues against the myth-theory that the early Rabbis never question the historicity of Jesus. But it is extremely likely that early Rabbis did use the Barabbas argument before the gospel story was framed. In an age destitute of historical literature and of critical method or practice, it sufficed to turn their flank.

[74] C.M. 352, § 21, and refs. A fair "biographical" inference would be that the betrayed Jesus had been an obscure person, not publicly known. This inference, however, is never drawn.

[75] Ward's View of the Religion of the Hindoos, 5th ed. 1863, p. 91.

[76] Cp. Prof. Drews, The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus, Eng. tr. p. 54 sq., for Niemojewski's theory that Pilate = the constellation Orion, pilatus, the javelin-bearer. This theory is not endorsed by Drews.

[77] P.C. 137.

[78] G.B. ix, 412 sq.

[79] G.B. ix, 415, note.

[80] Justin Martyr, Dial. with Trypho, c. 40.

[81] G.B. ix, 357 sq.

[82] P.C. 146; G.B. ix, 359.

[83] Second Leben Jesu, § 83.

[84] Die evang. Geschichte, p. 156.

[85] G.B. Pt. III (vol. iv), 113-114.

[86] "Upon an ass and [even in R.V.] upon a colt, the foal of an ass," Zech. ix, 9. I should explain that in denying that such "tautologies" were normal in the Old Testament I had in view narrative passages.

[87] C.M. 338-341.

[88] Gen. xlix, 11.

[89] The Historical Christ, p. 22.

[90] See p. 19, note, ref. to M. Durkheim. M. Durkheim is one of the greatest of anthropologists; he is not a mythologist at all.

[91] C.M. 340.

[92] Id. 341.

[93] Id. 218, note.

[94] Work cited, p. 14.

[95] Id. p. 76.

[96] See his Myth, Magic, and Morals, 2nd ed. p. 302.

[97] Comm. in Joh. x, 16, cited by Strauss. See his first Life of Jesus, Pt. II, ch. vii, § 88, for the views of the commentators on the episode.

[98] G.B. ix, 417.

[99] Cultes, mythes, et religions, i, 338.

[100] In John, the high priest is actually made to remonstrate from a Jewish point of view, by way of enforcing the Christian conclusion.

[101] Jésus et la tradition, p. 76.

[102] There might be involved, again, a reminiscence of the crucifixion of the last independent king of the Jews, Antigonus, by Mark Antony. C.M. 364.

[103] C.M. 365.

[104] P.C. 130 sq., 363. Cp. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 391; Greenidge, Roman Public Life, p. 55, citing Pliny, H.N. xviii, iii, 12.

[105] Apology and Acts of Apollonius, etc., ed. by F. C. Conybeare, 1894, p. 270. Here Dr. Conybeare momentarily appears as a myth-theorist.

[106] Id. p. 258.

[107] P.C. 115.

[108] The Christ Myth, Eng. trans. pp. 65-68.

[109] Cp. Cheyne, Introd. to Isaiah, 1895, pp. 304-5, as to Ewald's theory that Jeremiah may have been meant.

[110] So to be estimated whether he be "the" Deutero-Isaiah or a song-writer whose work has been incorporated. Cp. Cheyne, as cited, and his art. Isaiah in Encyc. Bib.

[111] The terms "Christists" and "Jesuists" are, it need hardly be said, used for the sake of exactitude. The term "early Christians" would often convey a different and misleading idea. There were Jesuists and Christists before the "Christian" movement arose. Dr. Conybeare pronounces such terms "jargon" (Histor. Christ, p. 94). In the next line he illustrates the delicacy of his own academic taste by the terms "tag-rag and bobtail." Such slang abounds in his book, and this particular phrase recurs (p. 183).

[112] It is interesting to note that in the Gospel of Peter one of the malefactors is represented as speaking to the Jews in defence of Jesus, whereupon they break his legs in vengeance.

[113] Ex. xii, 46; Num. ix, 12. Cp. Ps. xxxiv, 20.

[114] P.C. 113, 155.

[115] Granum turis in poculo vini, ut alienetur mens ejus. Talmud, tract. Sanhedrin.

[116] Vinegar in the Alexandrian Codex.

[117] C.M. 367.

[118] John xi, 50.

[119] See the whole question minutely discussed in Strauss, Pt. III, ch. iv, § 134.

[120] Zech. xii, 10.

[121] P.C. 125-6.

[122] Ps. xxii, 18. The citation in Mt. xxvii, 35 (omitted in R.V.) is a late interpolation, found in the Codex Sangallensis.

[123] C.M. 380.

[124] C.M. 364.

[125] C.M. 369 sq.; P.C. 150 sq.

[126] P.C. 319.

[127] P.C. 151, 368, note.

[128] P.C. 113, top. The preceding hypothesis with regard to the Meriah post is an error. Mr. H. G. Wood informs me he has learned from the Museum authorities at Madras that the apparent cross-bar was really a projection, representing the head of an elephant, to the trunk of which the victim was tied.

[129] P.C. App. A.

[130] C.M. 376.

[131] P.C. 196.

[132] Gal. iii, 1.

[133] vi, 17.

[134] De Dea Syria, 59.

[135] C.M. 373.

[136] P.C. 371.

[137] P.C. 157.

[138] C.M. 375.

[139] Id. 377.

[140] P.C. 166. Cp. Drews, Christ Myth, 42.

[141] Judge T. L. Strange, Contributions, etc., 1881. "The Portraiture and Mission of Jesus," p. 6.

[142] Cp. Charles, introd. to The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, 1908, p. xvi, as to John Hyrcanus.

[143] Cp. Charles, The Apocalypse of Baruch, 1896, pp. 52-53, notes. The Messiah, in the view there discussed, was to have been "concealed"--another cue for the evangelists.

[144] H.J. 153 sq.

[145] P.C. 304-6, 316-18; C.M. 331 and note.

[146] Conybeare, Historical Christ, p. 19.

[147] Col. Conder, The City of Jerusalem, 1909, p. 3, citing Rix.

[148] Id. p. 9.

[149] Id. p. 10; Eusebius, Life of Constantine, iii, 42.

[150] Conder, p. 13.

[151] Walter Menzies, Notes of a Holiday Excursion, 1897, p. 89.

[152] Work cited, pp. 154-5.

[153] Id. p. 156.

[154] Id. p. 140.

[155] "Il est à supposer," are M. Loisy's words. Jésus et la trad. évang., p. 107.

[156] Myth, Magic, and Morals, 2nd edit. p. 297.

[157] G.B. iv, 56. Cp. 154.

[158] 1 Cor. x, 21. I say "Paul" as I say "Matthew" or "John," for brevity's sake, not at all as accepting the ascriptions of the books. Van Manen's thesis that all the Epistles of "Paul" are pseudepigraphic is probably very near the truth.

[159] The retention of "devils" in the Revised Version, with "Gr. demons" only in the margin, is an abuse. For the Greeks, there were good daimons as well as bad; and "demon" is not the real equivalent of "daimon."

[160] C.M. 179, note.

[161] Cp. Athenæus, vi, 26-27; Schömann, Griechische Alterthümer, 3te Aufl. ii, 418-19; Foucart, Des associations religieuses, 50-52; Miss Harrison, Themis, p. 154; Menzies, History of Religion, p. 292.

[162] P.C. 194 sq., 306; C.M. 381, note.

[163] G.B. ix, 374 sq.

[164] On the points enumerated under heads 4-7 see Schürer, Jewish People in the Time of Christ, Eng. tr. Div. II, i, 11-36. In regard to my former specification of such influences (P.C. 204), Dr. Conybeare alleges (p. 49) that I "hint" that the Jesuist mystery-play was performed "in the temples (sic) built by Herod at Damascus and Jericho, and in the theatres of the Greek town at Gadara." This cannot be regarded as one of Dr. Conybeare's hallucinations: it is one of his random falsifications. No "hint" of the kind was ever given. The mystery-play is always represented by me as secretly performed.

[165] Cp. Ezra and Nehemiah.

[166] P.C. 168 sq.

[167] Schürer, as cited, iii, 225.

[168] Thus Dr. Conybeare, constantly. Upon his view, the Essenes can never have existed.

[169] Schürer, as cited, i, 3-4.

[170] Cp. Gunkel, Zum Verständnis des N.T., as cited, p. 20.

[171] The later documentists in such cases substituted an angel; but that was certainly not the early idea. See C.M. 112; Etheridge, Targums on the Pentateuch, i, 1862, p. 5.

[172] Jer. xi, 13.

[173] Ezek. viii, 14.

[174] P.C. 162.

[175] P.C. 321.

[176] E.g. the Biblical accounts of the adoption of Canaanite Gods by Israelites who married Canaanite women.

[177] E.g. the special adoption of Greek deities by Romans, apart from the political practice of enrolling deities of conquered States in the Roman Pantheon.

[178] S.H.F. i, 44-45.

[179] S.H.F. i, 48-49.

[180] C.M. 35, and note.

[181] See many details in C.M., pp. 52-57.

[182] Refs. in P.C. 51, note 6. Dr. Conybeare (pp. 29, 30) meets such conclusions of scholars (Stade, Winckler, Sayce, etc.) by excluding them from his list of "serious Semitic scholars."

[183] Exod. xviii, 12.

[184] Gen. xiv, 18; Ps. cx, 4.

[185] Heb. vii, 3. Cp. v, 6, 10; vii, 11, 17.

[186] P.C. 179.

[187] E.S. 115; Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, p. 291 sq.

[188] Or Jehoshua--the Hebrew name of which Iesous is the Greek equivalent.

[189] P.C. 163.

[190] The miracle of hastening the sun's setting is in Homer (Il. xviii, 239) assigned to Hêrê, the chief Goddess.

[191] P.C. 220.

[192] Josh. v, 13-15 is clearly late. In ch. xxiv the angel is not mentioned.

[193] P.C. 314, 315.

[194] Etheridge, The Targums on the Pentateuch, 1862, p. 5.

[195] The Samaritans have a late book ascribing to him many feats not given in the Jewish records. Concerning this Professor Drews wrote (Christ Myth, p. 57, note):--"The Samaritan Book of Joshua (Chronicon Samaritanum, published 1848) was written in Arabic during the thirteenth century in Egypt, and is based upon an old work compiled in the third century B.C." Dr. Conybeare (Hist. Christ, p. 33) declares the last statement to be "founded on pure ignorance," adding: "and the Encyclopædia Biblica declares it to be a medieval production of no value to anyone except the student of the Samaritan sect under Moslem rule." Be it observed (1) that Dr. Drews had actually described the book as a medieval production; (2), that his whole point was that it was legendary, not historical; and (3) that the Ency. Bib. article, which bears out both propositions, uses no such language as Dr. Conybeare ascribes to it after the word "production," and says nothing whatever on the hypothesis that the book is founded on a compilation of the third century B.C. That hypothesis, framed by Hebraists, is one upon which Dr. Conybeare has not the slightest right to an opinion. Dr. A. E. Cowley, in the Encyc. Brit., describes the book as derived from "sources of various dates." That being so, Dr. Conybeare, who as usual has wholly failed to understand what he is attacking, has never touched the position, which is that Joshua legends so flourished among the Samaritans that they are preserved in a medieval book--unless he means to allege that the legends are of medieval invention, a proposition which, indeed, would fitly consummate his excursion.

[196] Yeho-shua = "Yah [or Yeho] is welfare."

[197] Cp. Josh. v, 2-10.

[198] Canon Charles, The Book of Jubilees, 1902, p. 9, note 29.

[199] This thesis was substantially put by me in the first edition of Pagan Christs (1903). Dr. Conybeare, who appears incapable of accuracy in such matters, ascribes the Joshua theory (Hist. Christ, pp. 32, 35) and the special hypothesis that Joshua was mythically the son of Miriam, to Professor Smith, who never broached either. His pretext is a passage in the preface to the second edition of Christianity and Mythology, which he perverts in defiance of the context. On this basis he proceeds to charge "imitation." Aspersion in Dr. Conybeare's polemic is usually thus independent of fact.

[200] Historical Christ, p. 17.

[201] Id. pp. 8-9.

[202] Neither is it put by Prof. Drews, who merely cites (above, p. 41, note) from Niemojewski, without endorsing it, an "astral" theory of Jesus and Pilate. Dr. Conybeare appears incapable of giving a true account of anything he antagonizes, whether in politics or in religion. Elsewhere Drews speaks of astral elements in the Christ story; but so do those adherents of the biographical school who recognize the zodiacal source of the Woman-and-Child myth in Revelation.

[203] At another point (p. 87, note) Dr. Conybeare triumphantly cites Winckler as saying that "the humanization of the Joshua myth was complete when the book of Joshua was compiled." This grants the whole case. "Humanization" tells of previous deity; and just as Achilles remained a God after being presented in the Iliad, Joshua was "human" only for those whose sole lore concerning him was that of the Hexateuch.

[204] Der vorchristliche Jesus, p. 1 sq.

[205] Mk. v, 27; Lk. xxiv, 19; Acts xviii, 25; xxviii, 31.

[206] Perhaps an exception should be made of Dr. Conybeare, who believes Jesus to have been a "successful exorcist" (M.M.M. p. 142). This writer sees no difficulty in the fact that in Mark Jesus is no exorcist at Nazareth, and refuses to work wonders.

[207] P.C. 164.

[208] Rev. xxi, 14.

[209] iv, 4.

[210] Cp. ii, 9; iii, 9.

[211] iii, 14, 15; xix, 13.

[212] Origins of Christianity, ed. 1914, p. 27.

[213] Found in the Alexandrian and Vatican codices, and preferred by Lachmann, Tregelles, and Westcott and Hort.

[214] to deuteron. The R.V. puts "afterward" in the text, with "Gr. the second time" in the margin. Mr. Whittaker reads "afterward" also, after "the second time"--apparently by oversight.

[215] Deane, Pseudepigrapha, 1891, p. 312.

[216] Josh. xxiv, 31, in Septuagint.

[217] C.M. 352.

[218] Art. by H. G. Wood in The Cambridge Magazine, Jan. 20, 1917, p. 216.

[219] P.C. 202.

[220] Cambridge Magazine, Feb. 3, 1917, p. 289.

[221] G.B. v, 45 sq., 223; P.C. 364, 373-4.

[222] P.C. 112 sq., 131 sq., 140, 142, 144, 352, 362-4, 368.

[223] C.M. 354. I find that Volkmar (there cited) had in one of his later works put the theory that the traitor, whom he held to be an invention of the later Paulinists, would be named Juda as typifying Judaism. The myth-theory is not necessarily committed to the whole of this thesis, but the objections of Brandt (Die evang. Gesch. pp. 15-18) seem to me invalid. He always reasons on the presupposition of a central historicity, and argues as if Mark could not have been interpolated at the points where Judas is named.

[224] C.M. 208, notes.

[225] Der vorchristliche Jesus, 1906, Vorwort by Schmiedel, p. vii, and pp. 27-28. Ecce Deus, 1912, pp. 18, 332.

[226] Ecce Deus, pp. 16, 18, 50 sq., 70, 135; Der vorchr. Jesus, p. 40. But see Ecce Deus, pp. 66 and 196, where the thesis is modified.

[227] In the Literary Guide of June, 1913, Professor Smith defends his thesis against another critic. The reader should consult that article.

[228] S.H.C. 33 sq.

[229] Id. 35-36.

[230] On this problem cp. Prof. Smith, Ecce Deus, 251 sq.; and Prof. Drews, Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus, Eng. tr. p. 19.

[231] Enoch, xxxviii, 2; liii, 6.

[232] Id. xl, 5, and often.

[233] Id. xlvi, 2, 3, etc.

[234] Id. xlviii, 10; lii, 4.

[235] Id. lxii, 5.

[236] Schodde's introd. p. 51.

[237] Dr. Rendel Harris, Odes of Solomon, 1909, introd. p. 72.

[238] Harris, as cited, pp. 118, 125, 128, etc.

[239] Dr. Harris pronounces that an account in the Odes of the Virgin Birth (xix) must be later than the first century (p. 116). But this begs the question as to the source of that myth.

[240] Apropos d'hist. des religions, p. 272.

[241] Refutation of all Heresies, v, 5 (11).

[242] Cp. Drews, The Christ Myth, p. 54; and 2nd ed. of original, p. 24.

[243] Drews, p. 59; Loisy, p. 273.

[244] C.M. 316 sq.

[245] C.M. 363.

[246] Id. 364.

[247] Hæres. XXX.

[248] S.H.C. 6; C.M. 316.

[249] C.M. 314.

[250] Der vorchristliche Jesus, pp. 42-70; Ecce Deus, pt. vi.

[251] C.M. 314.

[252] Paper on "The Syriac Forms of New Testament Names," in Proc. of the British Academy, vol. v, 1912, pp. 17-18.

[253] C.M. 312. The thesis was put by me twenty-eight years ago.

[254] Der vorchr. Jesus, p. 54 sq.

[255] C.M. 316.

[256] Der vorchr. Jesus, pp. 56, 65.

[257] Cp. Philo Judæus, De Profugis:--"The Divine Word ... existing as the image of God, is the eldest of all things that can be known, placed nearest, and without anything intervening, to him who alone is the self-existent."

[258] Friedländer's thesis that the Minim were early Gnostics seems to be completely upset by Mr. Herford, Christianity in Talmud, p. 368 sq.

[259] Id. pp. 255-266.

[260] The fact that the Talmudic allusions to the Minim include no discussion of the Christist doctrine of the Messiah (Herford, pp. 277, 279) goes to show that a Messianic doctrine had been no part of the early cult, and that among the Jesuists who kept up their connection with Judaism it gathered, or kept, no hold.

[261] Cp. Volkmar, Die Religion Jesu, 1857, p. 287.

[262] Justin, 1 Apol. 26.

[263] Id. ib.

[264] See the whole subject discussed in Appendix B.

[265] C. 120, end.

[266] See H. J. 182.

[267] Ecce Deus, p. 68. In his article in the Literary Guide, June, 1913, Professor Smith argues that only as a protest against idolatry and a crusade for monotheism could Proto-Christianity have succeeded with the Gentiles. But that was simply the line of Judaism, which had no Son-God to cloud its monotheism. Surely Jesuism appealed to the Gentiles primarily as did other Saviour-cults, ultimately distancing these by reason of organization.

[268] Cp. Les Apôtres, p. 107; Saint Paul, pp. 562-3.

[269] Cp. S.H.C. 82.

[270] 19 Antiq. iii, 3.

[271] Ecce Deus, p. 230 sq.

[272] 20 Antiq. xi, 3.

[273] Life, § 2.

[274] XVIII, i, 6.

[275] 20 Antiq. ix, 1.

[276] Ecce Deus, pp. 235-6.

[277] The Jesus of History and the Jesus of Tradition Identified. By George Solomon. Reeves and Turner, 1880.

[278] Here Mr. Solomon, without offering any explanation, identifies Josephus's Jesus son of Sapphias, who was chief magistrate in Tiberias, with Jesus the robber captain of the borders of Ptolemais (§ 22)--a different person. I give his theory as he puts it. (Work cited, pp. 164-179.)

[279] Dr. Conybeare puts it as axiomatic that Jesus always speaks in Mark "as a Jew to Jews." Thus are facts "gross as a mountain, open, palpable," sought to be outfaced by verbiage.

[280] This aspect of the problem seems to be ignored by Erich Haupt (Zum Verständnis des Apostolats im neuen Testament 1896), who finds the choice of the twelve historical.

[281] See the passage in Baring Gould's Lost and Hostile Gospels, 1874, p. 61; and in Herford's Christianity in Talmud and Midrash, 1903, p. 90.

[282] Hibbert Journal, July, 1911, cited by Prof. Smith, Ecce Deus, p. 318.

[283] C.M. 344. For the convenience of the reader I reprint in an Appendix an annotated translation I published in 1891--a revision of that of Messrs. Hitchcock and Brown, compared with a number of others.

[284] Cp. "His Servant Jesus" in Acts iii, 13, 26; iv, 27, 30.

[285] C.M. 415 sq.

[286] Supernatural Religion, R.P.A. rep. p. 153.

[287] See the notes to translation in Appendix.

[288] It goes back to Jeremiah, xxi, 8.

[289] Encyc. Bib. i, 261.

[290] Cp. Prof. A. Seeberg, Die Didache des Judentums und der Urchristenheit, 1908, p. 8; and his previous works, cited by him.

[291] C.M. 344.

[292] A. Seeberg, work cited, p. 1.

[293] Dr. Conybeare nevertheless (Histor. Christ, p. 3) calls it a "characteristically Christian document," in an argument which maintains the early currency and general historicity of Mark.

[294] This thesis was put in C.M. 345. Yet Dr. Conybeare alleges (p. 20) that I represent Jesus as surrounded by twelve disciples solely because of the twelve signs of the zodiac. The latter item is given simply as an explanation of the calling of the twelve on a mountain (412), which Dr. Conybeare finds quite historical.

[295] It was probably about the year 80 that the Jewish authorities framed the formula by which they sought to mark off "the Minim" from the Judaic fold.--Herford, Christianity in Talmud, pp. 135, 385-7.

[296] Mr. Lester (The Historic Jesus, p. 84) argues that the baptism of Jesus by John must be historical, since to invent it would be gratuitously to make him "in a way subordinate to John." But when John is put as the Forerunner, acclaiming the Messiah, where is the subordination?

[297] C.M. 396.

[298] H.J. 135-6.

[299] Encyc. Bib. art. Baptism.

[300] A temporary Messianic Kingdom is set forth about 100 B.C. in the Book of Jubilees (ed. Charles, 1902, introd. p. lxxxvii).

[301] Charles, introd. to the Assumption of Moses, 1897, pp. xiii-xiv, liv.

[302] Id. pp. xi, 41.

[303] Charles, introd. to the Apocalypse of Baruch, 1896, pp. vii-viii.

[304] Id. p. lv, and refs.

[305] See above, p. 117, n.

[306] Above, p. 66.

[307] Cp. Mk. i, 8.

[308] In Hebrews vi, 2, also, baptism appears to be disparaged. But vv. 1-2 are incoherent. Green's translation gives a passable sense: the R.V. does not.

[309] Acts x, 48.

[310] Mt. xxviii, 19. Cp. Mk. xvi, 16.

[311] Testaments, ed. Charles, 1908, pp. xvi, 121.

[312] H.J. ch. vi.

[313] Van Manen, as summarized by Mr. Whittaker, Origins of Christianity, ed. 1914, p. 78, citing Epiphanius, Hær. xxx, 16.

[314] Id. pp. 124-5, 199.

[315] Eusebius, Eccles. Hist. iii, 24.

[316] Cp. Van Manen in Whittaker, p. 182.

[317] E.g. the dating of the rising of Theudas before the "enrolment" of Luke (6 C.E.); whereas Josephus places it about the year 45.

[318] The reference to "Aretas the King" in 2 Cor. xi, 32, one of the few possible clues in the Epistles, yields no certain date, and indeed creates a crux for the historians. See art. Aretas in Encyc. Bib.

[319] Cp. Van Manen, as cited.

[320] H.J. 199-203.

[321] Cp. Schmiedel, art. Gospels in Encyc. Bib. col. 1890.

[322] P.C. 316 n.

[323] P.C. 281.

[324] See S.H.F., chs. iii and v; and cp. Whittaker, Priests, Philosophers, and Prophets, 1911.

[325] P.C. 67 sq.

[326] S.H.F. ch. iv.

[327] First put by M. Maurice Vernes, Du prétendu polythéisme des Hebreux, 1891.

[328] See The Source of the Christian Tradition, by E. Dujardin: Eng. trans. R.P.A., p. 32; and the citations from MM. Vernes and Dujardin in Mr. Whittaker's Priests, Philosophers, and Prophets, 1911, pp. 124-127.

[329] Mr. Whittaker (p. 128) puts the view that Jewish monotheism was really a reduction of the universalist monotheism of the Mesopotamian priesthoods to the purposes of a nationalist God-cult.

[330] S.H.F. i, 44-46.

[331] Even Dean Inge avows that "The distinctive feature of the Jewish religion is not, as is often supposed, its monotheism. Hebrew religion in its golden age was monolatry rather than monotheism; and when Jehovah became more strictly the only God, the cult of intermediate beings came in, and restored a quasi-polytheism."--Art. "St. Paul" in Quarterly Review, Jan. 1914, p. 54.

[332] See, however, the contrary thesis maintained by Dr. A. Causse, Les Prophètes d'Israel et les religions de l'orient, 1913.

[333] Ecce Deus, pp. 71, 75.

[334] Cp. Whittaker, Priests, Philosophers, and Prophets, p. 45.

[335] Cp. Supernatural Religion, ch. iv.

[336] E.g. Art. in The Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1916, p. 605.

[337] Cp. J. A. Farrer, Paganism and Christianity, R.P.A. rep. pp., 19-20; Dr. J. E. Carpenter, Phases of Early Christianity, 1916, p. 57 sq.

[338] It may be argued that the really swift triumph of Islam in a later age goes to support Professor Smith's thesis. But the triumph of Islam was primarily military. And Islam too kept its cortège of "demons."

[339] E.g. in modern China.

[340] P.C. 62-63.

[341] S.H.F. i, 34, 72.

[342] Cp. Weizsäcker, The Apostolic Age, Eng. trans, i, 55. It is just possible that among people devoutly awaiting the imminent end of the world, some such communions might have a brief existence.

[343] A good support to Hobbes's thesis that the sin against the Holy Ghost is sin against the ecclesiastical power.

[344] S.H.C. 70.

[345] Cp. Acts xiii, 1; xv, 32; Rev. xvi, 6; xviii, 20, 24.

[346] Bampton Lectures on The Organization of the Early Christian Churches, 3rd. ed. 1888, p. ix.

[347] E.S. 113-115.

[348] Hatch, 26. Cp. his Hibbert Lectures, p. 291 sq.

[349] Id. Organization 28.

[350] Id. 28; Foucart, as there cited.

[351] As Hatch notes, p. 35, Clemens Romanus (ii, 16) echoes Tobit, xii, 8, 9, as to the blessedness of almsgiving. Cp. his citations from Lactantius, Chrysostom, and the Apostolical Constitutions.

[352] Hatch, p. 35.

[353] Id. p 35.

[354] Hatch, p. 37.

[355] S.H.C. 87 sq.

[356] Hatch, 29.

[357] "The Broken" is used as a noun: bread is only understood. Evidently the breaking was vitally symbolic, as is explained in the context. Cp. Luke xxiv, 30, 35.

[358] Irenæus, Against Heresies, v, 3.

[359] See Introd. to Messrs. Hitchcock and Brown's (American) ed., 1885, p. lxxviii.

[360] Above, p. 132.

[361] C.M. 422.

[362] Bousset in Encyc. Bib. i, 209, following Gunkel, Schöpfung und Chaos.

[363] Cp. R. Brown, Jr., Primitive Constellations, 1899, i, 64-65, 104, 119, etc.; G. Schiaparelli, Astronomy in the O. T., 1905, p. 72; Hon. Emmeline M. Plunket, Ancient Calendars and Constellations, 1903, 117-123, and maps; and Hippolytus, Ref. of all Heresies, v, 47-49.

[364] Rev. xviii, 2, 21.

[365] Encyc. Bib. art. James.

[366] A view independently put before his (1896) by the present writer.

[367] Admirably summarized by Mr. T. Whittaker in his Origins of Christianity. Cp. Van Manen's art. Paul in Encyc. Bib.

[368] Dr. F. C. Conybeare has indicated the view that, Van Manen's chair having been offered to him after Van Manen's death, he is in a position to dispose of Van Manen's case by expressing his contempt for it. And Dr. Conybeare is prepared to accept as genuine the whole of the epistles, a position rejected by all the professional critics except the extreme traditionalists.

[369] Eusebius, Hist. Eccles. iii, 39, end.

[370] This term, it will be noted, tells of an abstract or generalized and not of a "personal" tradition.

[371] Irenæus, Against Heresies, v, 33.

[372] Canon Charles, note on Apoc. Baruch, xxix, 5.

[373] Myth, Magic, and Morals, 2nd ed. p. 58.

[374] Id. p. 53.

[375] E. B. Nicholson, The Gospel according to the Hebrews, 1879, p. 101.

[376] Id. p. 104.

[377] C.M. 403 sq.

[378] Art. Gospels in Encyc. Bib. cols. 1868, 1872.

[379] Art. Gospels in Encyc. Bib. cols. 1767, 1846.

[380] 2 Kings i, 8: R.V. marg.

[381] This thesis is put by the Professor in art. Gospels in Encyc. Bib. col. 1881; also, at greater length, in his lecture, Jesus in Modern Criticism, and his work on The Johannine Writings (Eng. trans.; Black, 1907, 1908).

[382] I have dealt with the nine texts seriatim in C.M. 441 sq., and P.C. 229 sq. They are more fully and very ably discussed by Prof. Smith (Ecce Deus, Part III), with most though not with all of whose criticism I am in agreement.

[383] Eng. trans. p. 31.

[384] P.C. 234.

[385] Pref. to Eng. trans. of Arno Neumann's Jesus, 1906, p. xx.

[386] Work cited, p. 9.

[387] Unless we take the story of Thomas to be an invention to confute doubters.

[388] See above, p. 113 sq., as to the Nazaræans.

[389] De Principiis, iv, 22.

[390] B. v, c. 61.

[391] Cp. Neander, Church Hist. Bohn trans. i, 482-3. Jerome speaks (In Matt. xii, 13) of the gospel quo utuntur Nazaraei et Ebionitae, as if they held it in common. Cp. Nicholson, p. 28.

[392] Hippolytus, Ref. of all Heresies, vii, 22.

[393] Dialogue with Trypho, 47-49.

[394] Neander, as cited, p. 482 and refs.

[395] Epiphanius, Hær. xxx, 16.

[396] Nicholson, pp. 15, 34, 61, 77.

[397] Jesus in Modern Criticism, p. 33.

[398] Cp. the Professor's work on The Johannine Writings, p. 90, where the same query: "Who could have invented them?" is put as establishing special sayings of Buddha, Confucius, Zarathustra, and Mohammed. I cannot follow the logic.

[399] The argument is the same whether we say "inventions of the evangelists" or "appropriations from other documents, or from hearsay."

[400] P.C. 218 sq.; C.M. 395.

[401] P.C. 206, 223, 228; C.M. 395.

[402] Compare the story of Joseph, Gen. xxxix.

[403] Irenæus, Against Heresies, i, 26.

[404] Ecce Deus, p. 60.

[405] Id. pp. 171-2.

[406] Cp. Ecce Deus, p. 26.

[407] Dr. Thorburn (Mythical Interpretation, p. 34) sees fit to argue that the Christian phatnê was a "totally different thing" from the pagan liknon (that is, if he argues anything at all). He carefully ignores the sculptures which show them to be the same. (C.M. 192, 307.)

[408] Cp. Soltau on the appeal made by the story (Birth of Jesus Christ, Eng. tr. p. 4). "What is there," he asks, "that can be compared with this in the religious literature of any other people?" The critic should compare the literature of Krishnaism.

[409] Ludwig Conrady argues (Die Quelle der kanonischen Kindheitsgeschichte Jesus', 1900, p. 272 sq.) that the stories of the Infancy in the Apocryphal Gospels, which appear to be at that point the sources for Matthew and Luke, probably derive from Egypt, where the hieratic ideals of virginity were high. This may be, but the evidence is very imperfect.

[410] The precedents of the divine paternity of Alexander and Augustus, stressed by Soltau, would surely be inadequate. Heathen emperors would hardly be "types" for early Christians.

[411] The Rev. Dr. Thorburn idly argues (Mythical Interpretation, pp. 38-39) that such stories do not affirm parthenogenesis where a Goddess or a woman is described as married. As if Mary were not in effect so described! But in Greek mythology we have the special case of the spouse-goddess Hêrê, who is repeatedly represented as conceiving without congress. (C.M. 295.)

[412] P.C. 166, note 3.

[413] C.M. 99; P.C. 165.

[414] C.M. 191 sq., 306 sq.

[415] Encyc. Bib. art. Moses, col. 3206.

[416] C.M. 298.

[417] Id. 167 sq.

[418] C.M. 168-9. Cp. Dr. G. Contenau, La déesse nue Babylonienne, 1914, pp. 7, 15, 16, 57, 78, 80, 101, 129, 131.

[419] C.M. 180-205.

[420] Soltau argues not only that the belief in the Virgin Birth "could not have originated in Palestine; anyhow, it could never have taken its rise in Jewish circles," but that "the idea that the Holy Spirit begat Jesus can have no other than a Hellenic origin" (Birth of Jesus Christ, Eng. trans, pp. 47-48). He forgets the "sons of God" in Genesis vi, 2. The stories of the births of Isaac and Samson inferribly had an original form less decorous than the Biblical.

[421] It is doubly edifying to remember that the writer who pretends to find in avowed analogies of divine names, functions, and epithets a theory of a philological "equation," himself insists on finding in every New Testament naming of a Jesus, and every pagan allusion to a "Chrestus" or "Christus," a biographical allusion to Jesus of Nazareth. For Dr. Conybeare, the Jesus of the Apocalypse and the "Chrestus" of Suetonius are testimonies to the existence of Jesus the son of Mary and Joseph. The very absurdity he seeks to find in the myth-theory is inherent in his own method.

[422] C.M. 301-2 and refs.

[423] The Rev. Dr. Thorburn (Mythical Interpretation, p. 21) cites from the Encyc. Bib. as "the words of Dr. Cheyne" words which are not Cheyne's at all, but those of Robertson Smith. Smith, so scientific in his anthropology, is always irrationalist in his theology.

[424] R.V. "enrolment." Dr. Thorburn appears to argue (p. 39) that the "taxing" story in the Krishna-myth is derived from "ignorant copying" of the English Authorized Version! The "to be taxed" of the A.V. of course represents the traditional interpretation--that taxing was the object of the enrolment.

[425] C.M. 189-90.

[426] C.M. 273.

[427] I have been represented, by scholars who will not take the trouble to read the books they attack, as deriving the Christ-myth in general from the Krishna-myth. This folly belongs solely to their own imagination. Dr. Conybeare's assertion (Histor. Christ, p. 69) that in my theory the Proto-Christian Joshua-God was a composite myth "made up of memories of Krishna ... and a hundred other fiends," is of the same order. In his case, of course, I do not charge omission to read the statement he falsifies: it is simply a matter of his normal inability to understand any position he attacks. As regards the Krishna-myth I suggest only in the detail of the "taxing" the possibility of Christian borrowing through an intermediate source: in another, that of "the bag" which is carried by a hostile demon-follower of Krishna (C.M. 241-3), I suggest the possibility of Indian borrowing from the fourth gospel, where "the bag" is presumptively derived from a stage accessory in the mystery-drama, Judas carrying a bag to receive his reward.

[428] C.M. 205 sq.

[429] C.M. 207.

[430] Id. 347 sq.; Drews, Die Petrus Legende (pamphlet), 1910.

[431] Dr. Conybeare, undeviating in error, represents me (Histor. Christ, p. 73) as suggesting that the epithet bifrons led to the invention of the story of Peter's Denial. I had expressly pointed out that the epithet bifrons did not carry an aspersive sense, and suggested that the figure of Janus, with its Petrine characteristics, might have inspired the story of the Denial (C.M. 350-1). The subject of iconographic myth is evidently unknown matter to Dr. Conybeare.

[432] C.M. 318 sq.

[433] Die Versuchung Jesu (in Zur Gesch. und Litt. des Urchristentums, III, ii, 1907, pp. 53, 65.)

[434] The simple principle of holding Mark for primary wherever it is brief has meant many such assumptions, in which many of us once uncritically acquiesced.

[435] As cited, p. 85.

[436] Id. pp. 92-93.

[437] Test. Naphtali, viii, 4.

[438] This is ably argued by Prof. Smith.

[439] C.M. 329 sq.

[440] Id. 335 sq.

[441] Cp. Soltau, Das Fortleben des Heidentums in d. altchr. Kirche, 1906; S.H.C. 67 sq., 101 sq.; J. A. Farrer, Paganism and Christianity, R.P.A. rep. passim.

[442] C.M. 220 and note 2. Cp. W. J. Wilkins, Paganism in the Papal Church, 1901.

[443] Cp. Saint-Yves, Les Saints successeurs des Dieux, 1907; J. Rendel Harris, The Dioscuri in the Christian Legends, 1903.

[444] Compare Soltau's remarks on the hostility still shown to professional scholars who merely reject the Virgin Birth (work cited, p. 2), and the plea of Brandt for his piety (Die evangelische Geschichte, Vorwort).

[445] Apropos d'histoire des religions, end.

[446] Compare the recent volume of debate between Dr. Sanday and the Rev. N. P. Williams on Form and Content in the Christian Tradition. Mr. Williams argues against Dr. Sanday--who is less destructive in his criticism than M. Loisy--in this very fashion.

[447] Essay on Dr. Johnson (1884).

[448] Apropos d'histoire des religions, p. 320.

[449] Jésus et la trad. évang. pp. 286, 288.

[450] Id. p. 277.

[451] Jesus in Modern Criticism, p. 85.

[452] Id. p. 86.

[453] Id. p. 12.

[454] Id. p. 87.

[455] Jesus in Modern Criticism, pp. 79-81.

[456] C.M. 392.

[457] C.M. p. 90.

[458] So far as I am aware, the only explicit condemnation passed in the German Reichstag on the German submarine policy has been delivered by the Socialist Adolf Hoffmann, a professed Freethinker. He pronounced it "shameful," and was duly called to order.

[459] I have briefly put the case in pref. to S.H.C.

[460] Dr. Rendel Harris, on the other hand, in effect avows that his heart is warmed by fictitious "Odes of Solomon," in which the writer puts imaginary language in the mouth of the Christ.

[461] See J. McCabe, Sources of the Morality of the Gospels, R.P.A., 1914.

[462] C.M. 403 sq.

[463] Test. Gad, vi, 1-7.

[464] Canon Charles, in loc.

[465] There are many such close parallels of thought and diction between the two books. See Canon Charles's introduction, § 26.

[466] In The Historical Jesus, pp. 23-26, I had to point out how two Doctors of Divinity, of high pretensions, had scornfully denied that that story had ever been transcended, and how signally they erred. The second, the Rev. Dr. T. J. Thorburn, has since produced another work, in which the subject is carefully ignored. When theologians thus exhibit themselves as morally colour-blind, they relieve us of the necessity of proving at any length how congenitally incompetent they are to determine the moral problems of sociology by the authority they presume to flaunt.

[467] Schmiedel, Jesus, end.

[468] Art. Acts in Encyc. Bib., citing iv, 20; xiv, 22; xx, 24; xxi, 13; xxiv, 16.

[469] Egyptian Magic, 1899, pref.

[470] Comparative Religion, 1912, p. 57.

[471] Set forth in the National Reformer, May 15, 1887. Barnabas in effect avows that he is copying previous teaching.

[472] There are two titles. It is surmised, with good reason, that this was the original, though Mr. Gordon argues that it may be Sabellian, and of the third or fourth century. The "Lord" (the name is here used without the article, which was normally used in Christian writings) refers to the God of the Jews, not to Jesus.

[473] A pagan as well as a Jewish commonplace. Cp. Jeremiah xxi, 8; Hesiod, Works and Days, 285 sq.; Xenophon, Memorabilia, ii, 1; Persius, Sat. iii, 56. Persius followed Pythagoras, who taught that the ways of virtue and vice were like the thin and thick lines of the letter Y. This is the origin of the Christian formula of the broad and the narrow path. The conception of "the right way" is found among the ancient Persians. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, i, 539 (§ 448).

[474] Cp. Levit. xix, 18; Matt. xxii, 37-39.

[475] Cp. Tobit iv, 15; Matt. vii, 12. Hillel (Talmud, Sabbath, 306) puts the rule, as here, in the sane negative form, which is also the Chinese. The gospel form is less rational. The sentiment is the first principle of morals, and is common to all religions and all races.

[476] Cp. Matt. v, 44; Prov. xxv, 21; Talmud refs. in C.M. 406; and Test. of Twelve Patr. Dan. iii, iv; Gad, iii-vi. Canon Spence notes that the resemblance between the Testaments and the Didachê is "very marked." Note that in the Revised Version the text in Matthew is cut down--a recognition of tampering, in imitation of Luke vi, 27-8.

[477] Gr. "the nations" = "the Gentiles." Here, as elsewhere, we render by an English idiom, which gives the real force of the original. It will be observed that the compilers of the first gospel (v, 46) substitute "tax-gatherers" for the original, by way of applying the discourse to Jews in Palestine, where the tax-gatherers represented foreign oppression.

[478] A probable interpolation.

[479] Cp. Lament. iii, 30, and the pagan parallels cited by Mr. McCabe, Sources of Mor. of Gospels, pp. 229, 231.

[480] This clause, which is not in Matthew, is intelligible only as an exhortation to Jews in foreign lands. The reference to 1 Cor. vi, 1, cannot make it plausible as a Christian utterance.

[481] This is otherwise translated by the Rev. Mr. Heron, Church of the Sub-Apostolic Age, p. 16, thus: "the Father wisheth men to give to all from their private portion"; and by Dr. Taylor, Teaching, 1886, p. 122, thus: "the Father wills that to all men there be given of our own free gifts."

[482] Cp. Acts xx, 35. That passage probably derives from this, and loses point in the transference.

[483] Mr. Heron renders this "under discipline," because the early Church had no prison for its backsliders. Quite so. The reference is to Pagan prisons, and the warning is to Jewish beggars. The Greek phrase, en synochê, here clearly refers to a prison, though in Luke xxi, 25, it is rendered "distress" and in 2 Cor. ii, 4, "anguish." Cp. Josephus, 8 Ant. iii, 2. Canon Spence, who translates "being in sore straits," offers the alternative "coming under arrest."

[484] Cp. Ecclesiasticus, xii, 1 sq. It will be observed that the concluding clause modifies the earlier precept of indiscriminate giving. It may be an addition.

[485] A more developed teaching is found in the Testaments of the Patriarchs, as above cited.

[486] Gr. zêlôtês. The American editors translate this "jealous"; but Mr. Heron and Dr. Taylor more faithfully render it "a zealot," though this, a natural warning to Jews, would come oddly to Christians. "Zealot" specified a fanatical Jewish type (Luke vi, 15; Acts i, 13; xxi, 20), but the Jesuists were exhorted to be "zealous" (same word) in 1 Cor. xiv, 12; Tit. ii, 14. Nowhere are Christian "zealots" rebuked; but Jewish fanatics in foreign lands needed warning from peace-loving teachers. On the other hand, the rendering "jealous" is evidently adopted because of the very difficulty of conceiving that Christian teachers would warn their flocks against being either "zealous" or "zealots." The context, however, clearly justifies our translation.

[487] Gr. "high-eyed." The meaning evidently is "always looking at people," and there is implied the injunction to look down, as is the wont of nuns. Since deciding on the rendering given, we notice that the Rev. A. Gordon, in his translation (sold at Essex Hall, Essex Street), has "bold of eye." Dr. Taylor has "of high looks."

[488] Mr. Gordon has "a diviner from birds"; M. Sabatier "augure"; Dr. Taylor "given to augury."

[489] Mr. Gordon has "a fire lustrator."

[490] Cp. Matt. v, 5.

[491] Gr. "the high" = the upper or ruling classes.

[492] Cp. Heb. xiii, 7.

[493] Gr. hê kyriotês. Messrs. Gordon and Heron render "whence the lordship is spoken" or "proclaimed." In the New Testament (Eph. i, 21; Col. i, 16; Jude viii; 2 Pet. ii, 10) the same word is rendered "dominion" by the Revisers.

[494] Mr. Gordon adds here "in praying" in brackets. This is a guess, which seems to have no warrant, though Canon Spence leans to it. The sentence connects with the preceding one.

[495] Cp. Dan. iv, 27; Test. Patr. Zabulon, viii.

[496] Cp. Acts iv, 32. Here we seem to have the hint for the legend.

[497] Cp. Prov. xiii, 24; xxii, 15; xxiii, 13-14; xxix, 17; Ecclus. vii, 23-4; xxx, 1-2. A common Jewish sentiment, not found in the New Testament. Cp. Eph. vi, 4.

[498] Or type. Here, as in the New Testament, there is not the faintest pretence of impugning slavery. The resistance to that began among Pagans, not among Jews or Christians.

[499] Gr. zêlotypia. This is the normal Greek word for jealousy. Here, however, Mr. Heron has "envy," perhaps rightly.

[500] The American editors have "pursuing revenge."

[501] So Mr. Heron, we think rightly. M. Sabatier agrees. The American editors have "toiling for," and Mr. Gordon "labouring for."

[502] Or, handiwork.

[503] Probably a river or the sea. Cp. Carpenter, Phases of Christianity, p. 244, citing the Canons of Hippolytus.

[504] The Syrian method, introduced into Europe after the Crusades.

[505] The Jews, at least the Pharisees, fasted on Monday and Thursday, the days of the ascent and descent of Moses to and from Sinai.

[506] That is, Friday, called "the preparation" (for the Sabbath) by the Jews. Mr. Heron notes that the Christians fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays, but does not explain how a Christian document came to use the Jewish expression with no Christian qualification.

[507] After all the previous allusions to "the Lord" (without the article, save once in ch. iv and once in ch. vi) had plainly signified "God," we here have "the Lord" (with the article) suddenly used in a clearly Christian sense, to signify Jesus. The transition is flagrant.

[508] That is, in the original sense, thank-offering, as Mr. Gordon notes. Now, the sacrament, as instituted in the gospels, is not a thank-offering. It is evidently from the Didachê, or similar early lore, that the word comes to be used for the sacrament by the Fathers. It is never so used in the New Testament.

[509] As the American editors note, Clement of Alexandria (Quis Dives Salvetur, § 29) calls Jesus "the vine of David." As Jesus is "the vine" in the fourth gospel, but not in the synoptics, we may surmise that the Didachê was current at Alexandria.

[510] Gr. paidos. Canon Spence and Mr. Heron render "Son"; but this is not the normal word for son (huios), and the same term is used for David and Jesus. It is rendered "servant" in Acts iii, 13, 26; iv, 27, R.V.

[511] Gr. "in the ages."

[512] Cp. Matt. vii, 6. There is no such application there.

[513] Mr. Heron takes this to signify that the love-feast accompanied the Eucharist. But he notes, from Dr. Taylor, that the Jews had their chagigah before the Passover, in order that the latter might be eaten "after being filled." Mr. Gordon translates: "After the full reception."

[514] Gr. despota. The American editors (who render it "Master") note that this word becomes rare in Christian literature towards the latter part of the second century.

[515] So in the MS. Bryennios conjectures huiô (Son) for theô, but this does not justify the alteration of the text by several editors.

[516] A Syriac phrase meaning not, as is sometimes said, "The Lord cometh," but "The Lord is come." It was presumably an ancient formula in the prayers hailing the rise of the sun.

[517] It is difficult to reconcile this arrangement with any of the New Testament data as to the practice of the Jesuist apostles. Cp. Canon Spence, p. 91, as to "the Jewish habit of wandering from place to place."

[518] Cp. Mk. iii, 28-30; Matt. xii, 31; 1 Thess. v, 19, 20.

[519] The American editors have "a meal"; Canon Spence "a Love-Feast." See his note. And cp. Jevons, Introd. to Hist. of Religion, p. 333, as to the Greek agyrtes.

[520] On this obscure passage Mr. Heron has a long note, which, however, supplies little light. Dr. Taylor notes that a "cosmic mystery" [Gr. mystêrion kosmikon] is "the manifestation in the phenomenal world of a 'mystery of the upper world,'" citing the Zohar. Canon Spence suggests that the "table" connects with the "mystery."

[521] Gr. christemporos. Warnings of this kind are given in the Epistles of Barnabas, Ignatius, and Polycarp. See Canon Spence's note.

[522] Note the remarkable advance in the economic provision for the preacher, clearly a later item than ch. xi.

[523] Canon Spence rightly translates: "on the Lord's Lord's-day." This singular phrase is obscured by the American editors, who simply translate "the Lord's day." The Greek is kyriakên Kyriou. It is thus clear that the expression "Lord's day" was in Pagan use, and that the phrase "Lord's-day of [the] Lord" was an adaptation of the standing expression to either Jewish or Jesuist use. This chapter may have belonged to the pre-Christian document. There is no allusion to the crucifixion.

[524] Here the reference is clearly to Yahweh. The document cannot have been originally written with the same title used indifferently of Yahweh and Jesus.

[525] Mal. i, 11.

[526] Literally, "perform the liturgy" = "serve the (public) service."

[527] Here we have the Christist expression.

[528] This may have been a Jesuist allusion to Bar Cochab, about the year 135.

[529] Or "outspreading."

[530] An early support for the "Conditional Immortality Association."

[531] Apol. i, 26.

[532] If we could but trust the assertion of Origen in the next century (Against Celsus, vi, 11) that there were then no Simonians left, the presumption would be that they had been absorbed by another cult.

[533] Ovid, Fasti, vi, 213; Livy, viii, 20.

[534] Cory's Ancient Fragments, ed. 1876, p. 92; Lenormant's Chaldean Magic, Eng. tr., p. 131.

[535] Sanchoniathon, in Cory, as cited, p. 5.

[536] Eratosthenes' Canon of Theban Kings, in Cory as cited, pp. 139-141.

[537] Diodorus Siculus, ii, 4.

[538] Bible Folk Lore, 1884, p. 45; cp. Steinthal on Samson, Eng. tr., with Goldziher, p. 408.

[539] Movers, Die Phönizier, i, 558.

[540] Goldziher, Hebrew Mythology, Eng. tr., p. 132; cp. Buttmann, Mythologus, 1828, i, 221, and Sanchoniathon, as above.

[541] Volkmar, Die Religion Jesu, 1857, p. 281.

[542] Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, 1884, i, 214 n.

[543] McClintock and Strong's Bib. Cycl. s. v.

[544] Chaldean Magic, Eng. tr., p. 44.

[545] Against Celsus, v, 45.

[546] See it in McClintock and Strong's Cycl. s. v.; cp. Schürer, Jewish Nation in Time of Christ, Eng. tr., Div. ii, Vol. ii, p. 83, where the prayer is given as the Shemoneh Esreh.

[547] Schürer, p. 88.

[548] McClintock and Strong's Bib. Cycl. s. v.

[549] 1 Samuel xxviii, 13.

[550] 1 Kings xvi, 24.

[551] Die Religion Jesu, as cited.

[552] 12 Antiq. v, 5.

[553] G. L. Bauer, Theol. of the Old Test., Eng. tr., 1837, p. 5; Etheridge, The Targums on the Pentateuch, i (1862), introd., pp. 5, 14, 17.

[554] Bauer and Etheridge, as cited.

[555] Gieseler, Comp. of Ec. Hist., Eng. tr., i, 48.

[556] De Dea Syria, c. 33.

[557] Die Phönizier, i, 417, 634.

[558] Lenormant, as cited, p. 129.

[559] Justin, Apol. i, 26; Irenæus, i, 23, § 2; Tertullian, De Anima, 34.

[560] Die christliche Gnosis, 1835, p. 309.

[561] De Dea Syria, 40.

[562] Id. 32.

[563] Lenormant, as cited, p. 117.

[564] Irenæus, as cited.

[565] Lucian, as cited.

[566] Reland, Dissertat. Miscellan., Pars i, 1706, p. 147; cp. Enc. Bib. art. Samaritans, 4a. The dove was everywhere regarded in Syria as sacred, in connection with the myth of Semiramis (Diodorus, ii, 4), which bears so closely on the name Samaria.

[567] John viii, 48.

[568] Mem. the aged Simeon of Luke ii, who blessed the child Jesus. "The Holy Spirit was upon him" (v. 25). With him is associated Anna the Prophetess. Cp. Hannah, mother of Samuel.

[569] Professor Smith, who accepts the historicity of Simon (Ecce Deus, pp. 11, 103) does so without noting that it has been challenged. It would be interesting to have his grounds for discriminating between the God and the man.

[570] McClintock and Strong's Bib. Cyc.

[571] Kuenen, Religion of Israel, Eng. tr., iii, 314.

[572] 1 Cor. xv, 10; 2 Cor. xi, 13, 23; Gal. i, 7; ii, 11.

[573] 1 Cor. xv, 9; 2 Cor. xii, 4; Gal. i, 12.

[574] Even a late copyist or reader of one of the Clementine MSS. confusedly recognised a hostility to Paul as underlying his text. See Anti-Nicene Lib. trans., Recog. i, 70.

[575] Acts iii, 1-12, etc.; xiv, 8-15, etc.

[576] Gal. ii, 11-14.

[577] See the whole data discussed in Baur, Ch. Hist. of the First Three Cent., Eng. tr., i, 91-98, etc.; Paul, Eng. tr., i, 88, 95, etc.; Zeller, Contents and Origin of the Acts, Eng. tr., i, 250 sq.; Volkmar, Die Religion Jesu; Schmiedel, art. Simon Magus in Encyc. Bib.

[578] Cp. 2 Cor. xi, 4.

[579] John iv, 21.